Elitefts Company Story

The Unofficial Company Story From Who I Was to Who WE Are

Copyright © 2014 by David Tate All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Table of Contents Part One - Broken ......................................................... 5 Part Two - Reject ........................................................... 9 Part Three - Flunked Out ........................................... 14 Part Four - Back to School ......................................... 18 Part Five - Columbus, Ohio ........................................ 23 Part Six - The Lean Years ........................................... 30 Part Seven - The Bootstrapping Years ..................... 33 Part Eight - From ‘I’ to ‘We’ ......................................... 42 Part Nine - Being A Father ......................................... 49 Part Ten - The End of a Powerlifting Career ............ 56 Part Eleven - Mistakes................................................ 65 Paert Twelve - Adversity (Shit) .................................. 71 Part Thirteen - The People Are The System ............ 82 Part Fourteen - Underground Strength Sessions ... 91 Part Fifteen - Issues, MAW, and LTT ....................... 101 Part Sixteen - Almost Today .................................... 113

Part One

Broken

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I have no idea how long or how many parts this will be but by the time I’m finished you’ll know exactly where elitefts comes from and where it is going. These posts will also fill in many, many “why’s” behind the company. Elitefts is what I define as a “value based company.” Every action within the company is based on a set of defined values, as defined in our Legacy manual and on the “about us” page on elitefts. Our team has grown from me alone to a group of nearly 100 members (I think this group makes up 80). And part of writing this story is to redefine the meaning of these values in tandem with our growth. How were these values defined and where do they come from? To best illustrate this let me go back in history. I strongly feel we are influenced by our environment but I also feel we can decide how to be influenced by it. I come from a lower middle class family. I’m not a story from the “hood,” but, regardless, I never really fit in with anyone in my neighborhood or grade school. If there was a label for “learning disabled” I was given it. I kept a special paper clock on my desk to tell me when to get up and go see my special ed aide. With two sessions a day, I had two paper clocks on my desk. I was the only one in the class who needed this extra help and the rest of the school and neighborhood never let me forget that fact. If I was spat on or beat up on a daily basis, I was also called names and excluded from everything. I spent a lot of time alone in my younger days, not by choice but for want of peace and comfort. Much of these days I don’t remember. But I do remember the dinner conversations between my mom and dad. They owned their own appliance business and, through these conversations, I learned 6

the importance of quality over quantity, that it’s better to buy once and spend more than to buy twice and spend double or triple the amount. The customer is not always right but should always be respected – I learned that too. I learned that when you own your own business you need to work your ass off. There’s no excuse not to. I remember going out on service calls with my dad on Christmas. He’d talk people through how to use their new oven on Thanksgiving Day. I also remember the long hours he worked. I learned value and that your brand name is based on those values. While you might screw up, you need to always return to home base. Finally, junior high came and I got my fresh start. No longer did I need the kids in the neighborhood and no longer was I the only special ed kid. I was now in classes with others just like me. No need, really, to go into that stuff any further but, as side note, most of the kids I hung out with are no longer living so there were many lessons learned there, too, about life. I began my involvement in wrestling with those kids and I got my ass kicked all over the mat my first year. I sucked and I knew I sucked but getting my ass kicked was nothing new to me. After the last practice of my first season ended, my Mom was late picking me up so I decided to run the stairs. I ran and ran and ran. This went on for around 45 minutes. My coach walked by and asked what I was doing. I told him I was waiting for my mom. He then told me something that has never left me and changed my life from that point on. “As long as you work harder than everyone else you will never be beaten.” I’d listened to this guy yap all season. I was in his math class, sat with him at lunch when nobody else would sit with me, listened to all his premeet pep talks and none of that hit me the way this one statement did. You NEVER know the impact you can make on a life with one 7

simple statement. When I went back and told him 20 years later he had no idea the impact he made on me. You NEVER know who you can change. From that day on I busted my ass training. I ran my ass off. My dad got me into a Powerlifting Gym where a group of 30-40 year olds took me under their wing. They taught me how to lift, technique, how to train. Two were cops so they MADE me clean my personal life up or they wouldn’t let me train with them. I was a snot nose, 13 year old pain in the ass, learning disabled, weak, a broken kid and they didn’t care about any of that. They CARED about me and wanted to see me get stronger because they knew strength would change my confidence, how I felt and the actions I would make outside the gym. I FUCKING loved the gym. This was my haven from all the bullshit. It was my place to let my rage out and not get sent to court. With time I grew and got stronger. I actually got really fucking strong and never lost another wrestling match again. I also went from being the guy people picked on, made fun of and beat the shit out of to the guy nobody wanted to fuck with. Training changed my life but it was SO much more than that. Being told that Hard Work pays off changed my life. Having belief and support changed my outlook. Being instructed on how to train made me strong as fuck. Others in my school trained but they were not being trained with any type of real programing. I was. Being around people who wanted to see me get better made a difference - a huge difference. But this is only the beginning...

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Part Two

Reject

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Reject Classes As I made my way through junior high, I was tracked into what I refer to now as reject classes. The good thing was that none of the kids from my neighborhood were in them. The bad thing was (well, good at the time) that the teachers didn’t give a shit about us. I was with the same group of kids as we moved from class to class, and usually within the first few weeks, the teachers would just stop teaching us altogether, so all the classes became free time. I can’t blame this on the teachers as my entire class didn’t care at all, and all we did was anything except coursework. Discipline wasn’t effective as we were all used to being suspended, having to stay after school or paddled. I could write a book on this, but the one memory that sticks out the most was during one of my English classes. One side of the room was drawing pictures on the chalkboard, the other side had people smoking and blowing smoke out the windows. Two kids were snorting black beauty (stimulants) on the window sill, most of the others had headsets on and a few were reading magazines. The teacher used this time to grade papers from her other classes. None of us got great grades, but we all did get by with just barely passing grades. Some were expelled and moved to other schools. I got to stay because I was a very good wrestler. While all this was going on, I was power lifting after school and loved every second of it. I also loved wrestling and spent all my time training and practicing. If the teacher would let me out of class, I used this time to run the halls. My education sucked, but this was also at a time when good athletes slipped through the system. I also had all the labels that allowed for even more latitude. 10

Football Fast forward to the 9th grade (High school was 10-11 and 12). In the 9th grade, I was recruited to play high school-level football. I played football at junior high and destroyed people because I was way stronger and ... well... hated people. This caught the attention of the HS coach, and I remember sitting down with him in the junior high Lunch Room and telling him I wasn’t planning on playing in high school because I wanted more time to powerlift, and if my weight kept going up that I would have to wrestle super heavyweight. I am not sure of the weight, but it was around 200 pounds, and I was already lifting in the 181 class in eighth grade. The football coach wanted me to keep gaining weight. My plan was to stay OUT of the super fat class and keep wrestling and powerlifting. That was until the pressure from my parents, the coaches and every single person I knew kept pushing me and telling me how big of a mistake I was about to make, how I NEEDED the team work to better my life and an entire bunch of bullshit that still pisses me off today. The coach came back the next day with a list of reasons why I had to play football. Rather than deal with all the bullshit, I gave in and played. I will not say I disliked the game, but I didn’t love it. I was All State and did play my role but didn’t get along with my teammates at all. They were all into drinking and parties while I just wanted to train and win. It pissed me off. I never wrestled again but did barter that powerlifting would always be in the deal. So I was allowed to leave practice early on squat days (20 minutes early) and didn’t have to do any of their conditioning. I played my ass off even though I didn’t want to and learnt after 11

all of this to never give in on something I really love. I did finish HS weighing close to 250 with a single ply 650 squat, raw 500 bench and 600 single-ply pull in the 242 class. I won’t bitch about that, but I still know I could have been a hell of a wrestler and let someone else dictate my dreams instead of being around people who wanted to help build my own dreams.

College During my senior year, I decided that I needed to begin looking into college. This is when I realized I never thought of this before (or my future at all). I also discovered that I was “tracked” to just get out of school. I had no advanced math, science or foreign language. My English classes were called things like “Reading and Comprehension”, where I would read a magazine article and tell the class about it. My science classes were things like “rock science” where I got to learn the names of rocks. I also had “business math” that was really nothing more than adding and subtracting. All through high school, I never once did home work or took a book home, let alone to class. It was also arranged so the first 4 periods of every day were Gym, Study Hall or Volunteer Work. Once these were set up, my coach would give me passes out of these, and I would spend the first few hours of each day in the weight room. After two months, I was teaching all these classes, and my coach stayed in the football office watching game films, porn or whatever else he did. I never saw him. This allowed me to train using double split for the last two years of high school.

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Now What? Back to the grades and classes. Basically I was fucked. I didn’t have the credits to even graduate from HS. It took some tinkering, but they were able to find a way to give me credit for all the weighttraining classes I was helping with because I spent most of the time teaching and instructing. At 15 I was already an unpaid personal trainer - strength coach. I was looked at from several schools to play football until they saw my grades. I actually spoke to Buddy Morris at Pitt because they were looking at me, and I wanted to speak to the strength coach before deciding on a visit. Buddy was cool as hell, but once I told him my course work and my GPA was 1.6, he told me I didn’t stand a chance in hell but would be one of the strongest guys on the team. After two months of working in a factory, I knew I had to find a way to get into college... but how?

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Part Three

Flunked Out

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After barely graduating high school and while working in a factory making fake orange juice, I continued to powerlift and kept driving my total up and earned my elite status in my second weight class. I also helped with the strength and conditioning program at the high school and worked as a fitness instructor at a local health club. I knew I needed money for college even though I couldn’t find one to accept me.

Killing It Finally, after many phone calls and interviews, I got a break and was accepted into Tiffin University (a business college). The only thing was, none of the first-year classes would count for credit because they were all classes I should have taken in high school. I learnt algebra, biology, English and other basic subjects I slid by not taking in HS. The crazy thing was these were not hard classes at all. I went to class, listened, did my homework and got passing grades. I also hooked up with a decent group of powerlifters, but we were not able to match up training times so I ventured into bodybuilding. After one year there and a 3.2 GPA, I was ready to get the hell out.

Getting Killed I spent the next summer training, strength coaching my HS football team and working as a fitness instructor. Once the summer was over, I was onto BGSU. This place was awesome. I now found myself roommates with a former Mr Ohio, was training in the best gym I had ever seen, was bouncing and able to pay for school and food, Life was good. The other really cool thing is that I discovered this really cool place called the “library”. I joke about this, but until 15

then, I had never stepped foot in one except for detention or a tour. I had a girlfriend at the time who loved to study there so while she was doing her thing. I found a section packed full of Soviet Sports Reviews, NSCA Journals, Nutrition Journals. I spent hours upon hours reading this stuff - making copies and reading more. The one thing I didn’t do was go to class or study. They gave me a syllabus on day one and class wasn’t mandatory, so I did the ‘cram the night before’ thing. This didn’t work out so well, and I flunked out and packed my shit to move back home. I was only out for the next semester and could begin again in the summer if I liked. At the time, I was done with school. I did well at Tiffin, but it was only basic high school stuff that I should have learnt years before. Once I got to the next level, I got eaten up and felt it was beyond my intellectual capacity.

Lesson Learned When I was back home I started back out helping the high school players again and ran into my old wrestling coach in the parking lot. Even after I stopped wrestling, we still trained together often as he loved hitting the weights and used to use the phase “rip or be ripped” at every chance he had. I had great respect for him because he was intense and trained his ass off. He asked how I was doing at school, and I spent the next 30 minutes explaining periodization, unilateral periodization, how the Bulgarian’s trained and how I thought it could be modified to powerlifting and strength training. I did learn a shit-load in that library. He stopped me mid-sentence and asked how my grades were. I told him I flunked out and that school just isn’t my thing and that ever since I was a kid, I needed extra help and still couldn’t cut 16

it. He knew I barely graduated and he was familiar with my past. His listened and asked more questions about what my future plans, which were to get on at one of the better factories in town and keep training. He asked what I valued most in life, and I didn’t know how to answer. He asked a few more questions about what would make me happy and what I though I was capable of. Most of these answers were training-related. Looking back, I see what he was doing. He let me talk and explain all of my reasons why I couldn’t do things before making any suggestions. Once I was done, he told me something that changed my life and the way I saw education and learning forever. He told me that, regardless what anyone has ever told me, labeled me or said, I wasn’t stupid. He said that I just taught him more about training in 30 minutes than he had learnt in 20 years under the bar and from all the books he has read. My problem was not that I was stupid, it was that I was “fucking lazy”. Yes, it would take me longer and yes I may need extra help but this is no excuse to not be who you want to be. Lazy people make excuses and rest on labels and what other people say and think. People who make a difference and live the life they want work for it. Some have to work really fucking hard, and I was one for those people that needed to work harder than most. I spent what seemed to be two hours driving around PISSED OFF and confused about what I was told. Was this true? Was I not stupid but just lazy? Have I ever really applied myself at anything other than lifting weights? Honest to God... I didn’t know the answer. But I was going to find out. 17

Part Four

Back to School

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There were two main reasons why I wanted to go back to school: 1.

The gym in my home town sucked. I was now the strongest there and knew this wasn’t good.

2.

I wanted to find out if I was really lazy or not.

For the first time in my educational history, I wanted to see what I was really capable of. My first goal was to bring up my GPA to 2.5 (after flunking out, it was 0.75). I decided before going back that I was going to study what I wanted to study, not what everybody else wanted me to, such as business. Trainers really didn’t exist at the time, and I didn’t want to be an exercise lab rat. I knew two things. I was NOT going to repeat the courses I had failed and would fail again. This would result in me getting tossed out again and I would probably not be let back in. This risk was too high even though I knew that if I did get better grades in these courses, it would cancel the other. The two major failures were statistics, pascal and micro-economics. The next step was to take courses that I knew I would have interest in. I dumped the counselors and used two things to pick my courses. I first looked at the course catalog and went through all of the classes and highlighted the ones that looked interesting. Then, I went to the book store to look at the books to see if they really would be interesting or not. One time, I found two different classes using the exact same book - this was like finding gold. I took them both. I used this approach for 3.5 years and finally got my GPA up to 2.5. Now, I had to figure out what the hell I would do. I wanted to transfer but wondered with all the classes I have taken if I was close to graduating at something. While I worked as a bouncer and gym manager, I never took more than three classes at a time but went 19

year-round. I made enough to pay for school, live and train, so it was all good, but I didn’t want to be a full-time student. I spent two days going to every college on campus looking at their course outlines to graduate. After speaking to counselors and administrators, it was determined that I was one semester away from graduating with a degree in Sociology. Sociology? What the hell? It turned out that all the classes I picked at random fit this path almost perfectly. I like learning why people do what they do, what motivates them and why we, as a society and social groups, think and act the way we do. I was three classes away and one of them was a foreign language. This is where I had a huge problem. I had tried Spanish several times before and dropped it at the last moment I could before it affected my GPA. I had major issues here because while I was still trying to figure out how to spell the words everyone else was speaking and using them in sentences. Even with extra help, I wasn’t able to grasp this. WAY to much going on at one time for me to grasp. I decided that it was time to transfer and move to the University of Toledo. I sat down with an advisor, and we mapped out an individualized program based on training people - being a strength coach. I didn’t want the standard ex phy track because I felt it lacked nutrition, leadership and the marketing skills that were needed. We mapped out a two-year program (year round) that was independent studies with a major in exercise science and nutrition. This is what I always wanted to do and was excited to learn. I kept my bouncing job (but got a much better one) and dropped the gym manager thing because I was making four times more bouncing. I used my time to train and study - that was it. Nothing else. A turning point for me came when I took a 400-level nutritional 20

biochemistry class that I had to get special permission to take because I didn’t have any of the courses needed to take this. I was actually warned by my administrator to not do this, but I figured I could always drop it if I had to. This was the second-most awesome class I ever took in school. It was hard and did take hell of a lot of time as I have to learn chemistry while also taking the class, but this was an amazing class because I learnt how nutrients moved throughout the body. Throughout the entire class, I didn’t miss one text question. I knew after this that I was not that stupid kid in grade school. Not even close. Maybe not a genius or even gifted, but I learnt if I worked as hard in school as I did in the gym, I could have success. I then went back and retook all the classes I failed and got A’s in them all. I graduated with a 3.5 GPA (you start new when you transfer) and more importantly learnt I was not stupid – just lazy. I also learnt that I do have to work harder than others, and I accepted that. As a bonus, I was able to add a more scientific background to my ‘Under The Bar’ experience. Teachers have no idea now to really train, but at the same time, most coaches and lifters have no idea how the body really works. I wanted to work for the balance between the two. Lastly, I realized learning was going to become a HUGE part of my life. The real word was coming, but to this point, my education far exceeded what one learns in the classroom. Throughout all of this I did a few bodybuilding shows and decided to go back into powerlifting. When I went back, I was embraced and invited to train with World Champion Bob Wahl and his group. George Crawford also trained in the same gym and was extremely helpful with me (this guy is a PL Legend). Once again it was lifers and coaches who welcomed me in and showed me the way of strength. I learnt the importance of technique from them and hit my 3rd elite total in the 275 class. I know I had an ego at the time and knew that I understood training better than they did, but they were world champions and I wasn’t even close. I kept my mouth shut, 21

asked a few questions and did what I was told. I learnt, and I got stronger. There were two other PL groups in town, and I would have been one of the best in their groups. The guys in these groups avoided the group I was in because they wanted to be the big fish in a small pound. I selected Bob because he was the best in town and knew the best in the country. I didn’t care if I wasn’t the best in the gym. That’s just where you train. I wanted to break my own records and let the cards fall as they may come meet time. I am happy for my decision because I learnt so much that I would not have learnt in school or any other gym. Graduation came and it was time for another move...

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Part Five

Columbus, Ohio

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Columbus, Ohio I knew once I graduated that my education had to continue to grow for me to gain the knowledge I needed to advance as a lifter. Throughout my college years, I did spend a couple years bodybuilding but fell back into love with powerlifting and wanted to keep pushing as hard as I could. However, after six or seven meets with my total in the 1890-1970 range (at 242), I was going nowhere. I tried every type of periodization cycle I knew of, from linear, non linear, undulating, to some things that were just randomly tossed together. I even ran a short six-week program based on a scheme based of how the Bulgarian weightlifting team trained. No matter what I did, the end result was always the same. I seriously began to think that I hit my genetic limit and that I was the strongest I would ever be. Before this time, I did suffer a few muscle pulls, slight pec tears, but nothing I would really consider major.

Injuries Adding Up During my last year of college and while spinning my wheels, the wheels began to fall off. The first was lower back issues, then a torn groin. I pulled my quad so bad it turned purple for four weeks and I needed crutches. I found a way to train all of these and did the best I could to keep trying to pull meets together - even when injured.

Louie Simmons & Matt Dimmel I had known Louie Simmons since I was a teenager but really began communicating with him and mostly Matt Dimmel two years before graduation. They wanted me to move to Columbus after graduation, so I would make a trip down to train with them every 24

month and did learn quite a bit. I tried to implement what I was learning into my training, but didn’t really believe in most of the stuff they were telling me to do.

Torn Pec One month before graduation, I lifted in a bench meet in Columbus, Ohio that Matt Dimmel was lifting in. I traveled to the meet with Matt, and after I hit my opener with 460, I knew something was really wrong. This was a weight that would usually take 1/2 second to press and a weight I had done for 2 sets of 5 in training (raw). I barely made the opener and pressed 540 in training (raw) I jumped to 500 for my second and right before lockout, my pec tendon blew out, and the bar about broke me in half. I had a giant gap in my pec and the entire muscle was on the other side of my nipple. The nurse at the University clinic told me I pulled a muscle. It never bruised, but I was also not able to lift my arm. I trained what I could but was not able to get the bar out of the bench at all. This was an injury unlike anything I ever had before. I stuck it out until I finished my finals, and we moved to Columbus. The first thing I did when we got to Columbus was to find a good doctor. I say we because I met my wife my first year at BGSU (1988), and we have been together ever since. I was then told that I had ruptured the pec tendon off the bone. The muscle was torn - the tendon was torn off and would need to be screwed back in - that was the biggest issue. Surgery was scheduled and rehab begun. My first two months at Westside were split doing yoke bar work with a sling and spotting and loading plates. 25

Looking For Work While all this was going on, I was trying to find work. I had years of experience as a gym manager, years of experience as a bouncer, a couple years working with my high school football team, and many year of what they now call personal training (I called it teaching people how to train) but I didn’t have any experience to get my foot in the door as a strength coach at the University level. I was having a hell of a time getting hired in a gym doing anything. I worked for a temporary service and hated this with a passion and almost moved back to Toledo because I was making ten times more bouncing in Toledo and Detroit. I came to Columbus to powerlift, and my wife’s family was also from town. This was the most broke I had (we had) ever been in our lives, and it sucked. I was working well over 40 hours a week at min wage and still making all my training sessions. My first few years of college were tough but the bouncing thing ended up paying way more than I ever imagined it would.

A Real Job I finally caught a break and was offered a $10.00 per hour job as a fitness instructor in a downtown corporate fitness center. After some research, I discovered the average member made over 200K per year and was the elite of Columbus, as it was in the downtown area where all the banking, legal and lobby offices were. When I was presented the offer, I made a counter offer that I would accept minimum wage as long as I could do personal training and would be paid 50% at the time of hire (I also knew they did have a personal training program but it only did 4K the year prior - keep in 26

mind this was a long time ago and personal training was not the same as you see today). The 50% was 10% under what they were paying other fitness instructors but I had bigger plans for myself and their program. I would accept these terms if they would agree to create a head personal trainer position and put me in charge of it. With this they would also agree to pay the personal training percentage of 80% for all my clients, $10.00 per hour for administrative and 15% of all other trainers (they only had one at the time). It would be my job to train and educate all the trainers that would be hired down the line. This would only happen after the personal training program broke 100K in gross sales if or before 1 year. If this never happen my rates would stay the same until after my one year review. This had to be done between me and one other person I had yet to be introduced to. This was a risk, but I figured the risk was worth it and if they said no I would still be ok to fall back on the original offer. When I presented the counter offer I think they thought I was nuts but I laid out exactly how I thought this could be done, the work it would take, and that based on their members and the number of people through the doors each day I really believed it could be done. After I demonstrated that I did my research and put a lot of thought into this they agreed.I am sure because they figured there was no way this could be done and they had nothing to lose. After that year was up, we did 215K in training and I had 3 trainers working under me. This wasn’t rocket science; it was just knowing that this was an untapped market and my assumption was right. Nobody was even asking the clients if they were interested in training. I did have a sales process I used beyond just asking people, but 27

that is beyond the scope of this. What I discovered is that I loved to help other people reach their goals regardless of whether it was just getting into shape, to destress from work or to squat 900 pounds (I was doing my training at Westside). Within a couple years, I was tapped out, had a waiting list, and we really didn't want to add anymore trainers. Managing them wasn't easy, the drama was off the charts and trying to teach them to sell and train clients was more than I could handle. I could have done a better job of this but it would have meant dropping my client load or working more hours. I didn't have that much time to work with them and the club didn't want to pay my "training rate" for my administration time - something I also agreed with. I was finally making almost as much as I was as a bouncer but loved what I was doing. I would train clients from 6am to 8:30am, drive to WSBB and train from 9-11 and then back to work from 11:30 to 9pm. This was every weekday. I did work every other weekend but was able to get out of these based on the income the trainers were making. I knew the club really wasn’t making anything off me, as the percentage was too high (combined with admin hours and payroll costs I was costing them money), so I had to make sure they were making money off my staff and that they did a great job. As noted I was able to do this but it took more time than I liked and to really do the job how I felt it needed to be done would have taken another 15-20 hours per week. After almost a decade of doing this I needed a change. I came to the realization that I didn’t want to live the rest of my life this way, and I didn’t see how I would be able to have a family being in the 28

gym from 6am to 9pm every day. If I was to make any more income I would have had to add more weekends into the mix and then never be home. I loved my work (well most of it) I just couldn't see how this was going to grow from where I was. I was making more than the manager of the club so any promotion would have meant taking a pay cut. I felt stuck and we were in the process of adopting our first child. It was time for another change, and I needed some help but who to ask?

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Part Six

The Lean Years

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I had spent the last decade doing my own self-study of strength and conditioning. This included reading all the Russian manuals that I could find; everything on strength and conditioning I could get my hands on. I also passed my NSCA C.S.C.S and ACSM Fitness Instructor certifications, attended 6-8 seminars per year and networked with as many coaches and trainers as I could. I studied the book Supertraining, where I was able to find the authors’ email addresses and correspond directly with them. I spent close to six months digesting all the information. This all turned into assisting Louie Simmons with all of his consulting and speaking engagements, thus allowing me to build an even bigger network of coaches. I also learned from Louie how to create elite and professional powerlifters. I really didn’t care about other sports, but I wanted to perfect the craft of helping other lifters get as strong as they could. I became extremely proficient at discovering technical and physical weak points and, outside of Louie, was the best person doing this on the team. I was able to use some of these same skills with my personal clients (personal training) as the core essence of what I was doing was the same. The meant and the skill levels were vastly different, but I was able to use experience gains from each to help with the other. As time went on and I started to do more of these seminars, I was offered an assistant strength coach position with an NFL team. The pay was less than half of what I was making, and I would have to move. I wasn’t ready to leave Westside, as I felt I still could get more out of myself and help the team more, but I also didn’t want to uproot my life and wife to a lifestyle I wasn’t sure I really wanted to do. It was at this point that I realized it “really” was time for a change. I approached the CEO of the company I was working for and told him I had started my own company a year earlier (i.e. doing some 31

off-site training, selling supplements and consulting) and didn’t feel right answering calls between sessions. I felt it was best if we changed my structure from employee to contractor. This would mean no increase in pay (actually a decrease as I would now not have administrative hours), and I would have to buy my own insurance and pay all my own taxes. To me, this was the right thing to do because if I was going to try and build a business, it was not right or fair to do it on someone else’s time. He agreed with the deal and spent the next two hours speaking with me and giving me advice (very honest and good advice). I worked for a VERY good company that was very value and systembased. They lived and worked by the mission, vision, credo and values. Many of this structure can be found in Elitefts today - this came about from the two-hour meeting I had with him. He also suggested I set up an advisory board, and we looked over my client list and came up with a group of 8 people we felt could help me best. Looking back at this now, I still can’t believe the time and knowledge he gave me knowing this would eventually end up with me leaving the company. I did set up this advisory board, and the first time we met, we discussed what I wanted to do. When asked, I stated I wanted to help people get stronger and to see that what they learn in the gym can also be applied in other areas of life. We discussed and broke down many different business structures and arrived at a training center and consultation services. As we dug deeper and looked into what my non-financial goals were, we finally arrived at online retail with a focus on education of which anyone could take advantage. Before this decision, I was already doing a Q&A online, first though another site and then through Elitefts. It started as just a Q&A. It was after these meetings that we decided to add a store.

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Part Seven

The Bootstrapping Years

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Now we are into the meat of the company story. You can see where the foundation was built – I just needed to find a way to build the rest of the house. To try to avoid this from becoming a 20-part series, I will skip through some of these stages pretty quickly. The first years after I went full-time with Elitefts, I made nothing. And when I did, I put it toward more education. I became very efficient at “bootstrapping” and figuring out how to get the most out of everything I had and how to workout fair trades to get work done. I do not want to go into some of these exact items as this will be read by people I am sure will one day leave the company and I will have to compete against. I have learned over 15 years of business this does happen and will happen again. So, I am not sharing my startup secrets but will share some example of what other companies have done to illustrate: 1.

Many have asked for free pens at banks and so on so they would not have to buy them on their own..

2.

Amazon found a way to get around minimum book orders buy buying the books they needed (say 4 and the minimum was 20) and then ordered 16 others that were back-ordered or discontinued.

3.

Working out of coffee shops to avoid office space.

4.

Trading one service for another.

5.

I know of one training center owner who befriended a journalist who just happened

to get tossed out of his house and later divorced. He let the guy live with him until he got back on his feet. His training center and clients got a TON of free press without ever having paid for ad space. I found way to work with venders to help with inventory, terms, customer service, etc. I never haggled on price, as I didn’t want to be 34

a company that competed on price. I wanted to compete on service and quality. In business, you can only compete on three things: •

Price

•

Quality

•

Service

In today’s world, you can’t be the best at all three. You can really only be the best at one. The one for me is service because with this you can offer higher quality and providing free education is service. Service for Elitefts is the staff ’s customer service but also the free content we provide on the site for the readers and customers. This content IS our competitive marker and advantage. This is the one area I wanted to own when the company was founded and strive each day (15 years later) to make this always stay true.

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This, my history and values are where the aim ‘To Live, Learn and Pass on’ comes from. What this means to me is: To Live each day to its fullest; to not be scared; know that fear is part of the process and adversity is part of living. Use this adversity to become better while at the same time not losing sight of where I come from or taking things for granted. Embrace life and help others to find life is worth living - not just taking one day at a time. To Learn – understanding that the more you learn, the less you really know. To always be looking for ways to become better in all roles as your life. The only way to get better is to learn. I don’t care if it is through education, lectures, classes, experience, others or any other means. You can experience it and let that be the end all - or you can learn from these experiences to become a better version of yourself. To Pass on – to give back for all the things we have been provided. Giving is the greatest honor and gift we can give ourselves. The more you give, the more you live, the more you learn, and the more you learn, the more you have to pass on. The bootstrapping years seemed to last forever. It began with a folding table and a used computer that barely worked. In time, we moved out of the Columbus ghetto to a new house (we did really well off the sale of our first house) and this allowed for a bigger office, and I was able to buy a real computer. For the next several years, it was still me doing all the work. I took all the calls, packaged all the orders, handled customer service, prospected, answered the Q&A’s, answered all the emails, wrote articles, contacted suppliers and load content to the web site. You name it, I did it. I should note that Ken Hicks, whom I wrote about earlier, helped me with all the online stuff for free for MANY years and then for 36

$300.00 a month for even more years until I was able to hire him full-time. The site would not be what it is today without his help. I could tell hundreds of stories from these years and very few of them are good, but somehow I always had the faith that the bills would always get paid and there were many times I am not sure how this was done. I remember many times where the bills were due in one day and I didn’t have anywhere close to enough to pay them. Then I would get a check in the mail that would be enough to cover what was due.

Once I was finally able to hire someone to help me with my business skills, the first typing I was taught was that the day you start a business is the day you stop being a technician and start being an 37

entrepreneur. I was told I would need to find people to replace every aspect of the business except those that were required to grow (the strategic work). I can’t begin to explain how hard I fought this one. People were coming to the site to read my articles and my Q&A’s. Now I was being told I had to have other people do this if the business was to grow. I was the one writing articles all over the place, doing seminars and branding the company (what I was really doing was branding myself not the company). I was finally convinced that this is what was in the best interest of the company and added Bob Youngs to the Q&A and began looking for other people to write articles. The KEY thing was that they needed to fit the company values and they needed to want to do this as a form of giving back – NOT for money. This worked out well because I couldn’t pay them, but this is how I knew (and still know) that someone is on the site for the “right” reasons. I had no idea at the time that sticking to these key points and adding more people began to build a brand of integrity, character and value. This was because we are helping because we wanted to help – not for money. As the company began to grow, I figured that the product sales would be able to support the site and hopefully we would never have to charge for the information we provided. I always (and still do) think back to myself as a kid and all of those who helped me for free. What if they didn’t? Where and who would I be? I knew (and know) that the minute we charged for this information, we cut off a HUGE number of readers who really need it and can use it. I knew the pros and cons to this from the very beginning. The net margins in retail are very low (some companies operate on 2.5%, most groceries stores are in the 1% range. For education, the margins are HUGE (in the 80% plus range). Tangibles like pay 38

sites, ebooks, consultating, and other services can be very high margin if done right. What I wanted to do (and we do now) is try to go totally against the grain and give away the highest-margin education in hopes that the lowest-margin product sales would support the growth. Every consultant I have ever spoken with has told me that this is totally backwards, and we should be selling the content and products and that I am leaving all the profits on the table. I agree this is true, but what about that kid I wrote about or the coaches who do not have the capital resources to learn?Where will they find quality content if most the stuff you see is pure BS with only one motivation – to sell something. Time will tell whether this is a good concept or not, but we have been around for 15 years now. Although we are by no means the most profitable, I do know we have made a difference in many lives and helped people break many personal records. I had no idea at the time that it would take SO long before I would be able to pay myself. I never wanted to borrow money. Even though I did need to borrow $500.00 to buy some of the first inventory (paid back within 8 weeks), I haven’t needed to pull in any investors or partners to make ends meet. We have always used our own profit to build the company, and if I could go back in time, I wouldn’t change this. This forced me to think very hard on what to spend money on, how to determine what a real return on investment was and how to detail line items to determine what is necessary and what is not. I know this section is scattered, but the early years were very much the same: scattered. There was so much going on, and I was always in way over my head but kept pushing forward. I still remember the first month we sold $1000.00 like it was yesterday. While this 39

only had a yield of $100.00, that went right back into new inventory, and it broke the $1000 mark. We were stuck in the hundreds for a long time. I knew when we hit $1000, it was just a matter of time until we hit $10,000. $100,000 was a pipe dream, but I figured if I got better each day then I was one day closer.

Over several years, the inventory did grow and was now taking over my spare bedroom and office. I also now had a few more people on the Q&A and knew that we needed to move for us to grow, but that meant the added expense would also mean it would take longer before I was able to get paid for the work I was doing. I basically worked for Elitefts (elite fitness systems at the time) for free for the first 4-5 years and was putting in 60-hour weeks - 70-80 if you count the reading. 40

I did learn over this time that for the company to grow, it needed to be branded Elitefts. This name came about from readers online who didn’t want to type elite fitness systems, so they shortened it. I like that they created it so I stuck with and trademarked it as they were as much of the company as I, Bob, Ken or anyone else was. Without them, there was no company. So I knew I needed to become a business owner (not a technician), but I needed help and I needed more space. The next move was soon to come.

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Part Eight

From ‘I’ to ‘We’

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The next thing I want to touch upon is the mission of the company. The formal definition of this is: EliteFTS is driven to be the strength training industry’s number one online destination by providing readers the widest range of free educational resources, outfitting them with highest quality products and services, and supporting them with highest level of service and care. The short version and the one found on the front page of every page of the website is:

“Educating and outfitting the strongest athletes around the world.” To define this means we provide the education, motivation and empowerment to help “athletes” get better. We define “athletes” as those who place training as a top priority in their lives (coaches, trainers, lifters and strength enthusiasts). This is why we have always had top powerlifters, strength coaches, trainers, performance coaches, therapists, educators and others on the site. When I was a trainer, all I knew was what I learned from powerlifting, bodybuilding and school. The more I engaged and began to learn from the best personal trainers, strength coaches, performance coaches, physical therapists, educators, strongmen and bodybuilders, the more I realized how dumb I was in only segmenting my education to those associated with powerlifters. There was (and is) SO much knowledge out there but also so much segmentation. It didn’t take long for me to learn that coaches didn’t want to learn from PLs, PLs didn’t want to listen to coaches, PTs didn’t want to listen to the strength coaches and the strength coaches thought the PTs were full of shit. Bodybuilders think powerlifters are fat, and 43

powerlifters think bodybuilders are weak. I used to think the exact same way until I began to get out into all these different markets and realized how much they can help each other – BIG TIME HELP. The site was created to put ALL of these people in one place so the readers could see how they can learn from all these different groups. Over the years, I learned how to better dial in my training from team strength coaches. I learned from team physical therapists and chiropractors how to rehab and train around injuries, I learned from team bodybuilders how to optimize my diet, I learned through those on the team who had masters degrees in exercise science, coaches with great experience and people like Mel Siff how to validate and dial the material in my seminars. I learned more about business from the performance coaches who had their own successful facilities and in turn was able to have them help others on the team who have gyms. I wanted to become the site to go to for those who want to get stronger and we do this because we have top people from different disciplines working toward the same goal – “to make people stronger”. As the site continued to age, the more I saw this concept emerge and become a major factor in making Elitefts different from everyone else. After adding Bob, six of the next 10 additions for the Q&A were strength coaches, then came more powerlifters, trainers, chiropractors and physical therapists. With each new addition, the team began to form around something bigger than any of us expected. There was a TON of criticism with every addition – much more than I can describe. The hardest thing was getting readers to understand that there was value in mixing all these professions together. While I could have done without the hate, I knew we were 44

onto something because I saw the readers that we were attracting were not the same as you find on sites geared toward beginners. We were attracting readers who wanted to learn and looked to other disciplines to better themselves.This later became known as the “Darkside.” It was a concept that wasn’t accepted well (and didn’t help orders at all) but felt right. I think at the time, we all knew we were growing something but just didn’t know what that was. All I knew was we were attracting the right reader base, were giving back and doing it without cost to the readers. From the product sales side, this was still a disaster. The products were selling more and we still needed to move. Thinking back, it doesn’t sound like a risk but at the time it was huge. I had to move the business from my house to a bigger location.

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I found a dump of a place downtown for $400.00 a month. The problem was that this REALLY was a tough business decision at the time. I knew we would need to sell $4000.00 of product just to generate enough profit to pay the rent. This was around half our current sales. Then I discovered that to move would also triple my internet and phone costs, as the cost of these services for a business are three to four times what they are for a home. I couldn’t afford this, so what I did was make the move but only used the downtown location to ship from. I would work from home from 9-11:30am, then run downtown and pack up the orders so UPS could pick them up at 2pm and then run back home again to work on the site and answer the phones. I knew I would miss calls in the few hours I was gone but also knew these lost orders wouldn’t be enough to cover the expenses of adding the internet and phone lines in the other location. The building was around 800 square foot and was FAR more space than I needed. I used the front section for some of the prototype strength equipment I had, the middle for the office and the back for warehouse. My desks and shipping tables were folding tables, and the warehouse sleeves were purchased at K-mart. The site was starting to come together, the Q&A was picking up traffic and orders finally did start to pick up some; enough to actually put in the cable and phone line and it began to feel like a real job. Then I was hit with my first taste for the real word. I was saving for more inventory and got a legal letter from a competitor who wanted to sue me for reasons I won’t disclose. This was BS, but I still needed to take all the money I had to hire a lawyer to send a letter back and then the issues went away, along with all my money. A few months later, my wife lost her job and we decided that she 46

should work for the company since she was already doing all the accounting and bookkeeping. I had to figure out how to make more sales because we now lost all of our income (I was still not being paid yet). We had to find a way to get paid so we could at least pay the mortgage and eat. I began looking at how other retail sites operated that were not in the same field to search for marketing and promotional ideas. This inspired some of the concepts that we still use today and did help with sales. The seminars also helped but not in ways most people would think. . If I were to guess, I would say I did close to 200 seminars and actually made a profit on less than 10% of them. They did allow me to see and scout other gyms across the county. This provided a wealth of information that would later help with our product development and offerings.

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I spoke everywhere: university weight rooms and lecture halls, gyms, garages, bomb shelters, churches, business conference rooms, schools, family rooms, commercial gyms, aerobic rooms, outside, in prison, personal training centers, professional sports franchises, a coffee house...pretty much everywhere. Every trip was an adventure, and there are still stories to be told from each one. At its peak, I was in five cities over seven days. Several times I slept in the rental car because the seminar didn’t get enough people that allowed for the hotel room expense. While at times these were a pain in the ass, I still loved every minute of it because I was able to teach people how to break personal records and get stronger. I remember speaking at a large conference and having dinner with two other people who were big names in the industry, and we began speaking about our seminars. I assumed they were making tons of money on theirs, and what I found out was they had many of the same stories I had. This made me feel better because I began to see that I wasn’t the only one who felt like they were paying their dues. Based on my past, I knew things were never going to be easy for me, so I was going to do whatever I needed to do to make this work, no matter how long it took. The one thing that I remember the most from this time was when I was on the road for ten days straight. I couldn’t afford to use the hotel internet connection and we didn’t have smart phones. While I was working, I was away from the site and the office for one week. When I came back everything was fine. The Q&As were still rolling and my wife had everything under control. It was then that my view of the company changed from “I” to “We”. It was no longer just about ME. I wasn’t quite sure of how I felt about this at the time, but as you will read, it did change the course and direction of the company. I was also in my "prime" competing years.

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Part Nine

Being A Father

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I had to take a break from writing these as they were getting to be depressing to me. Too many bad memories. Well, not really bad, but there were a lot of hard times, stress, adversity, and we seemed to be growing, but the pace was too slow to make any significant difference. Even when you are growing at 20% per year, when you start at nothing, it takes time for your capital to build. Add to this our net margin was between 5-7% and losing money on almost every seminar. I would be lying if I said there weren’t a number of times that I wanted to go back to being a trainer. I had a fraction of the stress and made way more money. I was taught at a young age that if you begin something you finish it and never quit, so I stuck with it. Months went by, and I was ripped off by a supplier that once again drained half our capital with no product to show. I just happened to be scheduled to do a private seminar for a building contractor. This was one of the oddest seminars I have ever done because it was only him, his CEO and his assistant in the room. I did my thing (by this time it was pretty locked in), and then we went to the gym for the practical side. His corporate gym was amazing. It was HUGE and had everything you can think of to be strong. While being a very successful building contractor, he was also a meathead – just like me. After 20 minutes of teaching him how to squat, I no longer saw him as the multi-millionaire who was setting me up like royalty but just a guy looking for a bigger squat, bench and dead. After training, we went out to eat and then back to his house. He asked me about Elitefts, my current state and future plans. These were not BS questions; he was generally interested. I told him of our aim, mission and values, where I wanted to be and the struggles we were having (mostly financial). This was REALLY hard to admit be50

cause I didn’t want to ask for money and not have him think I was asking. The last thing I ever wanted or wanted people to think I wanted was a hand out. He made me feel comfortable enough to tell him the truth and I did so because I could tell he cared and would offer something better than money – advice.

I also expressed that my greatest fear was we were barely able to pay the bills, and now I also had an adopted baby boy that was just going to make matters more complicated. I was going to have to find more time and money so I could be there for him and pay for his needs. I didn’t see how I was going to be able to make this work. I actually had no clue, and it scared the hell out of me. I can still hear his exact words in my head today: 51

“Being a father WILL make you better in business.” I asked him how, and all he said was that in time, you will know. We kept in touch over the next few years as he would buy some items from time-to- time, and he would ask how things were going. The answer was always the same – we were plugging along but no huge growth spike. He would tell me this was good, and I would jokingly disagree, but about a year later, things began to come together, and I started to understand what he was trying to tell me. When you are a father, you need to think more clearly with your business because now others (who can’t take care of themselves) rely on what you do and what decisions you make. They are also under your wing for 18 years, so growing slow and steady can keep you in business longer than fast and furious. As soon as I put this together, I sent him an email telling him that I got it and the reply back was… “Almost” To this day, I still don’t know what part I have yet to learn, but I do know that when it happens, I will know. I made MANY great contacts through these seminars and meets I was attending. Most of the team members were gathered his way. They were people I got to know well, knew their values (or thought I did - I did make some mistakes) and more people were added to the site. Slowly, we were becoming known as the go-to site for strength and conditioning information but also a site known for its character and integrity. We were not jamming highlighted text in people’s faces and using all the latest and greatest internet marketing tactics. We did know that we HAD to have sales, because if we were not going to jam the sales at people in articles and product copy, we 52

needed to let people know we actually did sell products - as this was what was paying for the site. This is still one of our biggest problems to date. Throughout the years, we continued to grow, but I knew that I was missing something. I needed more top lifters on the site, but getting them was an issue because of other sponsors who offered gear. We didn’t have Metal Gear at the time and the other companies, while they did express interest, would never get back to me with price lists or how to place orders.

I met with Metal Sports and Wear, and in a hotel room in New Orleans, we worked out a deal we both could live with. There are many factors with importing: customs, duty, taxes, shipping, classification, carriers, material labels, margins and returns. It took some time, but we finally worked it all out and this time it wasn’t going to 53

cost half of what we had saved, it was ALL of it. This had to work or we were screwed. Oh, the gear was also two to three times the price of all the American suppliers (they don’t have to pay all the same fees; customs, duty, shipping, taxes, and make the stuff on their own). My hope was that they would see the higher prices and instead of holding their prices down they would jump them up as it would provide them with 2-3x the profit they were making. That was my hope because if they didn’t we would have had a hell of a time selling products 200-300% higher.

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If they would have held to their price, we wouldn’t have sold any gear at all, but they didn’t. They introduced new lines and doubled their prices So this move didn’t tank us, and it also gave us some leverage to sponsor top lifters. The only issues were the gear and expenses for us. Even today, to outfit a new lifter can cost upwards of $2000 because we don’t manufacture it. While free to the sponsors it’s not free to us. We didn’t have the money to do this, but what we did have were guys like Brian Schwab who were interested and willing to work with whatever we could do. My exact words to him were, “I am not sure what we can do but together we will figure it out.” To this day, this is still pretty much how the sponsorship and team program works. It is and has always been important to us that we help our sponsors succeed both on and off the platform. Looking at our current team and past alumni you can see this isn’t just typed words but something we take seriously. I am proud of what our team has done on the platform but take the greatest pride in what they have done outside of that. Around this same time, we started getting some school weight room orders and we were now building a business (still at the same rate). With more capital to invest, we began hiring people to help. Out of the first three, two are still with us today. One is parttime purchasing and the other is still active on our Q&A. I had a lot to learn about staffing and leadership, so it took time and I had to start the learning process all over again. However, I was slowly beginning to delegate most of my administrative work so that I could focus on what needed to be done to grow the business and myself. This “learning” phase was critical to the journey into the next phase of Elitefts.

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Part Ten

The End of a Powerlifting Career

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Before moving forward, I want to go back to the night I spent with the building contractor as what I learned from him in one night continues to teach me today. Here are some points that we discussed. I have found every single one to be true, but when I was first told them, I thought to myself “nope, this won’t happen to me.” I was wrong on every count. Here is a short list of some of the items we spoke about: 1.

No matter what you do, your life and business are very hard to separate, and you will, in one shape or form, work all the time.

2.

Nobody will care about your business as much as you do.

3.

Everyone will think you earn 100 times more than what you really do.

4.

If you fail (and the odds are very high that you will), your best option is to start a new business because finding a job will be extremely hard and your work experience was failing. If you do fail, there is a good chance that you will lose everything you own in the process. Losing a business is not like being fired from a job. There is no unemployment package you can apply for and there is a good chance your assets will be leveraged to try and save the business. If you are fired, you just go and try to find a new job; two different worlds. I am lucky that I have not found this one to be true but have had to leverage all I own to get through tough times.

5.

No two years will ever be the same, and forecasting is an art as much as it is a science.

6.

There will be times when you will feel completely isolated and have no idea who you can trust.

7.

You are responsible for ALL actions of the company. Not just 57

yours but every single person who represents you. This is both in the public relations and legal sense. 8.

You will never use a “vacation away message” with your email, and if you do, it is not sending a very good message.

9.

Your personal income will never be steady or secure, and you will always be asking yourself, “should I pay myself or reinvest back into the company”

10.

The saying ‘You can’t please everyone’ becomes a reality, not just something people say. You will face this everyday.

11.

You will always be a ‘dick’ to someone. The best example I have with this is our sponsorship process. It is very tight, researched, long and not easy to become a team member. The last two that were added took a year or more of following them before adding. Just to be considered should be an honor, but for some reason, if they are not selected, then I am the biggest dick in the world.

12.

The fear of failure never goes away. The fact is that in today’s environment, a business can tank in 3-4 weeks.

13.

Regardless of how you feel, do the right thing anyway. You will always come out better for it.

14.

When people take advantage of you (and it will happen), you will be told something along the lines of “business is business.” But, if you are the one who makes the strategic move, then “it was all personal.”

15.

You get to discover who your real friends are. The first clue will be that they’ll be the first ones to pay and WON’T let you have it any other way. Associates will ask for a discount, and the real assholes will just feel entitled to get everything for free.

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16.

People who feel they know better than you will offer great advice, point out how you’re wrong in what you’re doing and know they could do better, yet they have zero vested interest in the company.

17.

If you do begin to succeed, you get the added bonus of family members, friends and associates hating you for any and all reasons you can think of. You will also attract critics at an alarming rate.

18.

You will be sued… more than once

19.

You will be screwed over by those who you NEVER thought would ever do so. There are many more. I wrote them all down and even wrote

one article about this already. The take-away from this is that the road is not this nice, linear growth road where you make PR after PR and get stronger and better every month. This sky is not always clear, and the money doesn’t fall from trees. The reality is that you are really in a shit-storm hurricane trying to find a coffee can of money buried in somebody’s backyard. If you study, learn and pay attention then you MIGHT be able to know what yards to look in, but regardless of what you know, the hurricane is still going to be there trying to knock you on your ass at any chance you have. The sooner you realize this, the easier it becomes because the unexpected becomes expected and you become much more aware of triggers (or indicators) that let you know when things are falling off path. Many times, these indicators are the core values of the company.

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That intermission is over. Time to get back on track. Where were we? Oh, the main street address with a handful of employees. Over the next couple years we had to expand next door, and about a year later, I was no longer able to hold onto a squat bar (this is relevant). I had had two surgeries before this and went in to have it looked at again only to be told my shoulder was full of arthritis, bone spurs, degeneration, torn librium and a torn rotator cuff. My choices were to live with the range of motion I had left and do all I could to keep it from getting worse or a total shoulder replacement. After being told the same thing from three specialists, I opted for keeping it as it is as the pain is not too bad. I just can’t overhead press, hold a barbell on my back or bench heavy to my chest. In 2005, my powerlifting career was over. I was and am not willing to trust the technology that is now out there for a shoulder replacement unless the pain is so bad that I can’t live with it. I can still do 90% of the movements I want to do and my limitation barely affects my life. This did mean that I would no longer be spending 4 weekday mornings in the gym and not getting into the office until noon. I would now be in the office during regular hours as well as the same night hours that I had always worked. I changed my training from morning to after work, and this allowed me better focus on the strategic and planning aspects of the business. I also discovered that my best “strategic and planning time” was in the morning from 6am to 10am. My focus was far better, and this allowed for me to drill down into what is really important and how to get these done, as well as how to use the staff of Elitefts and team members to help drive this aim home. We still kept growing at the same 20% rate but ran into a problem where we ran out of space and couldn’t add inventory or 60

hire one more person because there was no where to place them. At this point, we were able to save up enough capital to pay for a move and the expenses, as well as afford double the rent we were paying. We looked for close to a year, and right when we were about to give up looking, a friend of a friend let us know of a place. We went and checked it out. It was more than we could afford to pay but decided to take the risk and move into the next location.

We would now have 4000 sq foot for the warehouse; 2000 for the weight room and 1500 for the office (3 different building locations, AKA Compond). There was also room to expand if needed. We bit the bullet, made the move, and as always, everything did cost more than we thought it would and there went all of our capital again. The difference was this had happened so many times to this point, and I knew it would come back up; it would just take time with 61

the owners getting paid less or not at all. Even to this day I can’t justify being paid (as an owner) if the company is not growing. To me, this means that it is not making money, and that this is my fault. I’m responsible and shouldn’t be paid.

Next we had to expand the warehouse into the weight room and move the weight room off-site. This was a very cool building but we knew this had to be short-term because it was propane-heated and very expensive. We did not have memberships and used this as a showroom and for staff and sponsors to train. If they left the heat on after one session and we didn’t get back into the gym for a few days, this easily would cost $300.00 in heat. This brings us to 2008 and the recession. This kicked our asses. Very little equipment was selling at all, and this is 50% of our revenue. We could barely pay the bills, we cut expenses everywhere we could, owners’ pay was cut and we still had to cut some employee benefits. We didn’t have to let anyone go, even though the 62

orders and sales were down. At the time, many of our equipment and accessory products ideas were being borrowed by others (this is just how business works), so our plan was to do our best to misdirect our competitors into thinking we were putting all of our resources into equipment marketing and design. We knew that based on the sales and the economy, we needed to change our focus to smaller, higher-profit items but didn’t want our competitors to know what we were doing. So we started looking into our own straps, wraps, apparel and accessories.

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Around the same time, a few of our suppliers ran into money issues and began asking us to prepay for items 90-120 days in advance when we were already set up at net 30. They tried to make their money issues ours, so because we would not agree to their ridiculous terms, nor would they accept anything else we offered we created our own lines, thus opening up a few other revenue streams. BUT all of these would take months to come together and once again... all the money we had. This plan worked well, and we ended the year 5% over the prior year. We were also able to restructure our strategic plan for the future. It was a very stressful year, and I think that we all learned a lot that year that would help us though the harder times that would come later. Throughout all this, we kept adding team members that understood what we were doing and wanted to be a part of it. I also began to get over my head again and began looking for new people to help as advisors for not just the company but for me as well. As we grew, my weakness had to improve. I needed help and found that help through some team members but mainly through a small group of people I set up based on the skills that I lacked the most. For the most part, things were going well, but little did I know just how bad the shit was getting ready to hit the fan.

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Part Eleven

Mistakes

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The years 2008 and 2009 were very challenging years for Elitefts. 2008 was 5.07% over 2007, and 2009 was 7.08% under 2008. These were very challenging because this was unexpected based on the average growth rates since 1998, and we had no idea how to fix it or what to do. We did get through this with a lot of strategic planning, careful control of expenses and only investing in people, ideas and products that we felt had a great chance to breakeven and yield a high return. I would rather not speak about all the lessons learned though this time but instead to focus more upon what we did discover as we began to try to expand the team members slightly outside the culture of Elitefts. We wanted to expand into different markets to try to bring in much needed revenue, but at the same time, we wanted to stick to the same values of only bringing in those who were in the top 10% of what they did. This didn’t work and actually backfired, and it created more confusion than conformity. We brought in people from different sports and professions hoping that this would bring these markets to the site. What we didn’t realize is that these markets were ALREADY on the site and using it was a reference to help their own sports and professions. They didn’t add value and may have hurt the value because they were providing information that readers from these fields already saw as basic. While on the topic of mistakes, I feel I should admit something that I feel is necessary and is important to be added into this series. I have made FAR more mistakes than things I have done right. There is no doubt about this. I have close to 400 articles on the site and there may be 20 that are really good. I have answered over 100,000 Q&As, and I am sure 66

that less than 10% would be things that I could copy and paste to a book. I have added hundreds (if not thousands) of products to the cart that never sold only to have a small percentage sell well. I have completely changed the specs of specific machines to make them 100 times better to only sell maybe one unit per year. I have created products, like the Blast Straps, that I should have patented but never did, and now there are knock-offs that are making millions off this idea. There have been other products we had created to which the same thing has happened. I have not done my due diligence more times than I should have. I have said things that I should not have said and stayed quiet when I should have spoken up. In short, what I am saying is that I have done most of what I have done wrong or failed at what I was doing, but there are two constants: 1.

I made sure they were executed from start to finish.

2.

I went into each one knowing that they would work because even if they failed, I knew that there would be something to learn from it that would help the company.

This is why I am so big on execution because a job half done is a job NOT done. A job that is completed and failed is something that can be inspected, annualized and learned from. One job done that succeeds pays the bills. A job that is half done to sits on a to-do list forever and is neither paying the bills nor creating a situation that makes anyone better. Over these years, we added some GREAT people to an already very good team. As always, there were some that didn’t fit well, but there were many who did fit extremely well and are still with us today. It was during these years that the team began to form more in67

ternal relationships by emailing and calling each other. The process of helping each other was taking place behind the scenes, and a “culture” was beginning to develop. People were not helping each other to get props or credit online; they were doing it in order to help other team members. For many, close friendships were being formed and stronger relationships developed. We may not have been growing externally from a financial perspective, but the seeds were being planted for the internal growth that was beginning for flourish into something special. Due to the stress on the company, I was not as active as the team members as I was years in the past, but small tribal groups of team members who knew each other the best or lived closer together were forming.

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By no means am I suggesting that there were not problems. There always have been and will be. This is just part of being a team, but unlike years prior, it started to feel like most people were working toward the same goal of living, learning and passing on. And it did lead to a great rebound year in 2010. This is when I began to see that when our internal staff was working together, things moved forward. When there were internal issues, things would come to a halt. This was only one of the lessons I learned about the power of teamwork. 2011 would be the year where I would see what team Elitefts was really about and could become. This will be my next post. During these years, we moved the weight room back on site because our warehouse space opened up. It was a HUGE cost savings bringing it back in house. We also kept expanding the apparel line and brought our equipment line up another notch. We were also now beginning to deal with many competitors, big and small, that were borrowing our product ideas, reverse engineering with cheaper materials and, in many cases, call the products the same name as we were. I figured that this was just part of business and “imitation is a form of flattery.” I would also soon come to realize that that line was BS. Oh, I was also served legal letters from two companies I NEVER, EVER expected to get from. The threats of legal suits began to come, but none of them cost more than a phone call to work things out or a letter back from our lawyer. Nonetheless from people I considered friends. They could have simply called and the "issues" would have been resolved easily. I learned and this has stood true, in business, the ones you trust most or speak the most about it will be the first ones to stab you in the back. I was told this years ago but it doesn't hit home until it starts happening. I had to learn to sepa69

rate what is best for the business from all relationships. I was beginning to realize that many of the things I was told and warned would happen were actually beginning to happen, and it was time for me to grow up and learn how to deal with these things in a business manner instead of personal. As you will read, there is a BIG difference.

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Paert Twelve

Adversity (Shit)

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It has been a while since I wrote the last part of the company story. It’s not because I haven’t had the time. It’s not because of writer’s block. The reason is, I wasn’t sure how to write it. It was Mike Szuderak who reminded me that I already did. As company presidents, business owners, coaches, mothers, fathers and so many other roles we hold, we have been told,“the best stay cool under pressure.” When others are freaking out “stay calm, cool on, and on track.” You may have heard, “lead by example, keep your head up and drive on.” While I do agree with these statements, there is another side of this that usually isn’t told. Behind every great leader there is a person who has had to deal with a ton of shit. It is the adversity (shit) that is partially the reason they are in the place they are. Better said, it is what they have learned from the adversity that has put them where they are. There are those who deal with pain and those who avoid or run from it. As humans the storms WILL come and what you think is a hurricane today will only feel like rain many years from now. If you don’t learn from these storms, every rain shower will feel like a hurricane. I am no different than anyone else. I have had to deal with my share of adversity in my life. One of the worst times in my life was in 2008-2009. As you will read below, this was a living hell for me. Thinking back on it now, I am extremely grateful for it because... It completely changed me. Up until this time I thought I knew who I was and I was completely wrong. I was nothing like the man I thought I was or wanted to be. I’m not really sure I ever knew who I really was until this period in my life. It changed how I saw other people. I began to open up more, trust, and look for the good in people instead of keeping my distance. I began to see conflict as a good and necessary thing. While I won’t say I welcome it with open arms or go out looking for it, I will say I will not shy away from it if I think it will make my family, the 72

company, or myself better. I also know it will always (at some level) be part of my life. •

I realized just how small and insignificant I really was.

•

I discovered what true friendship is.

•

I began to understand that I couldn’t do everything on my own.

•

I became a better husband, father, son, brother, and friend.

•

I realized that team elitefts™ was not just a marketing tool, but needed to become a culture of people who cared about each other and something bigger than us all.

Over the course of one year, my life as I knew it completely changed. I still may not know exactly who I am, but I do know who I want to be. I work each day to become one step closer to this. Therefore, my vision of what elitefts™ was, is, and will be became much more clearer. As I was told on the phone yesterday by one of our sponsored lifters, “Elitefts™ is much bigger than me or any other team member. It’s even much bigger than Dave Tate. Elitefts™ has to always do what is best for elitefts™ To be honest if I was told this years ago, it would have pissed me off. But when I heard it yesterday it was one the greatest thing I have been told all year. I may be the founder, but by no means am I elitefts™. As I write about the next five years, you will begin to see how this period in my life completely changed the life and culture of the company. There are many of you reading this that were part of the team before and after this time period. If you think back you will see what I am speaking about. Those closest to me will know exactly what I am writing about. 73

I hear and read so many times that people can’t change. My response is always the same: You can do whatever the hell you want to do. The reason you aren’t changing is because you don’t want it bad enough—you haven’t figured out what bad enough means. 74

Excerpt From Raising The Bar – Pain 1.

physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury: She’s in great pain.| those who suffer from back pain.

2.

a feeling of marked discomfort in a particular part of the body: He had severe pains in his stomach. | chest pains.

3.

mental suffering or distress: the pain of loss.

4.

(also pain in the neck or vulgar slang pain in the ass) [in sing. ] informal an annoying or tedious person or thing: She’s a pain.

“Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.” — Simone Weil, 1910–1943 French philosopher, mystic “Nothing begins, and nothing ends that is not paid with moan; for we are born in others pain and perish in our own.” — Francis Thompson, 1859–1907 British poet “The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.” — Anais Nin, 1914–1977 French-born American novelist, dancer “There are two big forces at work, external and internal. We have very little control over external forces such as tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, disasters, illness, and pain. What really matters is the internal force. How do I respond to those disasters? Over that I have complete control.” — Leo Buscaglia, American expert on love, lecturer, author 75

Personal note: I wrote the following during one of the lowest points in my life. People have suggested leaving this material out of the book, but I think we learn the most about life from our failures. Against the wishes of many of my advisors, I’m keeping this chapter in.

Journal Entry The last few days have been pure hell on me, and the storm keeps brewing. My greatest fear in life has arrived, and I had no idea it was coming. I have no idea what to do. I suppose the best way to write about this is to leave out the cause and look at the effect. Writing that the last few days have been “hell” is an understatement. I’m in the worst hell I’ve ever known, and I don’t know what to do or where to turn. The pain runs so deep, the depression is so fierce, and I’m wracked with guilt, worry, loneliness, emptiness, sorrow and remorse. My head won’t stop pounding, and my nerves are in a state I’ve never known before. I’m not sure what’s happening beyond this mental pain that simply won’t stop. A few hours ago, my arms began to go numb and my upper back was in knots. Spasms ran up the back of my neck, making my head feel like it was in a vise. My entire world is closing in on me. All of my dreams are gone. My purpose is gone. My reason to live... All I remember is that something wasn’t right. I got in my car and drove to the hospital. On the way there, I was unable to see and think through the tears caused by my physical and mental pain. The drive seemed to take a lifetime, and I found myself in the emergency room parking lot with no idea what was going on. The mental strain I was under was enormous, and the guilt I felt was beyond my comprehension. I 76

tried to get out of the car, but I couldn’t move my legs because the feeling of pins and needles ran from my toes up to my knees. I was filled with pain, worthlessness and emptiness. I had no self-esteem whatsoever at that moment, and I hated the person I saw looking back at me in the rearview mirror.

I pulled out my phone, thinking I’d call the ER to come out and get me. I wondered if there was someone else I could call. After going through my list of contacts, I realized there was nobody I could call if I needed help. I have people in my life, but I had no idea who I could call in worst case scenarios like this one. Nobody in my life, or so I thought, gave a shit, and it was my actions that had caused this. The pain in my upper back grew so intense that it forced me to pull my head up to seek relief. As I looked up, I saw the same familiar clouds I used to spend hours staring at as a kid, and I started wondering what death would be like. Would I be alone? 77

Would I be in heaven or hell? Would the pain go away? Would I be free of the constant pressure in my head? Would I be free of this? Would I be free from that? Would I be able to leave my past behind me and find true happiness? Could I be the person I wanted to be? If I died, would I even be a person? What was there? Whatever was there simply had to be better than what I was living for the past few days. I decided not to go into the hospital, hoping I would die in the parking lot and finally be free. I was okay with this, and sat in my car for two hours waiting to die. After that, I figured this wasn’t going to happen easily, just as nothing else in my life has never happened easily. I was going to have to find a way to do this on my own. I spent the next few hours on the internet trying to find the best way to be “free.” I found many options, but all of them had survival rates that I wasn’t happy with. Knowing myself, I knew it wouldn’t work according to plan. Nothing ever does. I could try to smash my car into a tree, but I’d survive. I could try to overdose or gas myself, but I’d end up living the rest of my life brain dead. I could try to hang myself, but the noose would break. I came to the conclusion that my best option was to blow my head off, so I went to Walmart to see if I could buy something to do the job. I knew I wouldn’t be able to buy a gun, and I didn’t have time to borrow one, but I figured there had to be something I could find. I sat in the parking lot too depressed to even go into the store. It hit me that I was totally fucked up at this point, and I drove back to the 78

hospital. I sat in the parking lot for another hour, but I was afraid to go in. What would I tell them? I wanted to die, but I sucked so bad at it that I couldn’t do it myself.

I made a call to a friend of mine and asked him how you know when you’d hit rock bottom. I explained my situation, and he told me I wasn’t even close to rock bottom yet. Things would get worse! “It’ll get worse?” I asked in astonishment. “I already want to die!” “You haven’t done it yet, have you?” he replied. “Then you’re not at your all-time low. If you were at rock bottom, you’d be dead. The question is, why aren’t you dead yet?” “I don’t know.” “I do,” he said. “It’s because you want to survive. So do it. You have 79

time to figure out how to live. Just turn the car on and drive away, taking one minute at a time.” I knew from talking to him that I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t know who I was anymore. I’m not sure I ever knew who I really was in first place. All I knew at the time was the pain, and it wasn’t stopping. I knew I didn’t want to die, but I had to figure out the rest for myself. I had no idea how I was going to do it, but I wanted to survive and I knew that as long as I kept taking one breath at a time, I wouldn’t die. One breath turned into one minute. A minute turned into an hour, and then an hour turned into a week. Did I really hit rock bottom? Who can answer this for anyone? All I know is that I thought dying was an acceptable option, and I found comfort in that. I’d never been that low before, and I’d never experienced so much pain in my life. Sitting in that parking lot, I was the same boy from my past wondering what life would be like outside of myself. I wondered what life would be like if I could be free of who I really was. The pain didn’t come in avoidance of knowing who I was. It came from taking a close look and myself and not liking what I’d seen. The pain was not avoidance. It was acknowledgement. After the pain and the decision to survive, I made a change that day. I changed. I no longer wanted to live life chained, carrying a heavy suit of armor. I embarked on a journey of self-discovery filled with even more pain as each layer was peeled away. Each brick fell, and the armor was taken off one piece at a time. I’m not writing this to scare you or impress you. I’m not writing it to make you feel sorry for the kid with no friends who grew into an adult who hid his true self. I’m telling you this to impress upon you that we all 80

have hard times. We’ll all have some very hard times, filled with obstacles, adversity and pain. The cause of the pain is irrelevant. It’s our reaction to it that makes us a spectacular species. We have to ability to choose, to seek out why, and to find ways to change and create the life we really want. If we’re willing to look, we have the tools to be happy. Sometimes these tools seem very far away, and we look to others for happiness. We think material things or more money will make us happy. We think we’d be happy if others would change. If... If... If... If.... You fill in the blanks. Yes, there are times when we all need help, but we usually just need to look at ourselves in the mirror in order to change. Look beyond the eyes looking back, and look into your heart. In powerlifting, as with any other sport, we all live with pain. I’ve suffered more injuries than just about anyone I’ve ever met. I thought many of these injuries would put me out of the sport for good. As athletes, however, we know there are always ways around injuries if we have enough desire and enough will.

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Part Thirteen

The People Are The System

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“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.” – Dale Carnegie While things slowly got better with me, I also began to realize (as noted) that I needed help. I also started to look very closely at with whom I was surrounding myself, meaning staff, team members, people in the gym and so on. Were these people that I could trust? Why were they in my life? While I did a lot of soul searching on myself (for well over a year), this began to expand into the company and culture of Elitefts. Were the people on the team, suppliers, staff and other associates the people who were going to help build the brand or were they there so the brand would build them? While I wasn’t ready to make changes, I was becoming much more aware. The one thing I did notice was that the company’s sales success was directly related to “drama associated within the company.” It didn’t matter if it was staff drama, supplier drama or sponsor drama, it always had a negative effect on sales – even when readers and customers had no idea it was going on. With this, I realized that I needed to spend more time working in the office instead of from home. My work in the office was so that I could be more aware of what was going on. I used to be out of the office much more than I am now because I could get more work done at home as there were no distractions, but this work was only one role of my job. The other role, the one I didn’t even know mattered that much, was being neglected.

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To be an effective leader, you first need to be aware. Awareness is EVERYTHING! What I used to see as a waste of time soon became my highest priority. Just being in the office and listening to the people on the phone, seeing how they work, how they interact, what they bring to my attention and what they don’t bring to my attention all has value. After I finally embraced the importance of this, I saw there was much work to do.

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While I did go through a very intensive business development course that focused on the importance of “systems”, and I did for a very long time think a system-driven business is an effective business, I began to see this is not entirely true. You need “people” to work and create these systems. I was shifting my focus more away from a system-driven business to a people-driven business. There is no doubt there is importance for both, and to me, when these come together, you get what many call “culture.” This is what my new objective became. I wanted to create a culture for Elitefts that was mirrored online and offline, regardless of the position. But I had no idea where to start. Then life hit again...HARD! This time, I had no control over any of it. Within a span of a few months, my wife had a pulmonary embolism that put her seconds from death and from being at the farm to open-heart surgery in less than 12 hours. I lost my Dad after a hard fight from having a stroke. We had a business deal go bad that wasted seven months of work and tens of thousands of dollars, my son’s school life came to its limit, and we had to pull him out of the system (a special needs child in a system with a shitty special-needs program). The difference between this “hell” and the “hell” I was living before were two totally different things. This time I had faith that no matter what happened, I would make it through. The old saying, “When you find yourself in Hell, keep walking” comes to mind. Also, I didn’t feel alone. I WASN’T alone and didn’t have to deal with this on my own. As I noted previously, I became a better husband, father, son, brother and friend because I had people to help that I didn’t feel wanted something in return. I felt I could be open and ask for help and not be judged for it. 85

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I also discovered something else. As I have always been open with my training log, I discovered something that makes Elitefts different, something that gave me strength and confidence. Something... I can’t really describe accurately. Since I am writing off the top of my head, I will just keep typing. What I found was the team of Elitefts staff were not just staff members or people who only discussed and talked about training. They (you) were people from all backgrounds (mostly professional) who cared! When my wife was recovering, I had emails from people who had been through the same thing with their family members (or themselves). One even took over the treatment of her to make sure everything was right and made damn sure I knew not only what had happened but what I needed to do to help. When my Dad went down, I had emails and calls of support and many follow-up emails asking how things were going. One came to town to help the business while I was home with my family. When dealing with my son, I discovered there are three elitefts™ team members who work with special needs, and they have NO IDEA how much their support helped. I could write pages about the help that I have received from team members in regards to training, business, injury and surgery rehab. It wasn’t that long after that I realized this same support was being given to other team members by team members. Each one was reaching out, asking for or offering help. The culture I wanted to create was always there. I was just too blind to see it. That is, until I opened my eyes and put all the fucking systems aside. This isn't to say there were not problems, there were and will always be. 87

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2010 went on to be one of the best years we have ever had as a business. Many changes were made, some easy, many not so easy, but all made with the best interest of the company in mind. I no longer made decisions based on my gut but set up a small group of advisors that I could toss ideas and issues to that have helped me see things from totally different perspectives, more so than I would have without them. I relied heavily on them for some time, and while they are still there, they have taught me how to step back and to look at issues from 10,000 feet and to see the big picture, not just what is right in front of me. I can't stress the importance of this and how it TOTALLY changed my perspective of what "culture" means in business. Through this period of the business, I became better because the team made me better. My family became better because the team helped me see what other “professionals” wouldn’t tell me. The team got better because the team helped them get better. Through Karma or whatever you want to call, it this was also a great competitive year for most of the team members, and the business was back growing at its average growth rate again. The objective wasn’t to increase the bottom line or beat sales records. This was a side- effect of finding the culture known as Elitefts. That was the ONLY objective we had that year. I learned to sales are not the goal but the side effect of the process. Don't misunderstand you must have sales and more importantly profit but the focus needs to be on those things that are most important to creating it. Value is an underused word in business discussions but one that needs to be used more. For example, we can do something TODAY that will generate a TON of sales but at what cost? What val89

ue does it really have? The value isn't the sales it brings in that day. Value has a long tail. If it was a sleazy sale you may sell a ton of new people but drive away repeat business so your short term sales will look good but 3 months down the road you will be wondering what the hell happened. I began to look at the value of everything this way and it changed our entire marketing mix. But the story isn’t done yet. We have a few more years to go.

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Part Fourteen

Underground Strength Sessions

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cul·ture [kuhl-cher] Show IPA noun, verb, cul·tured, cul·tur·ing. noun 1.

The quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc.

2.

That which is excellent in the arts, manners, etc.

3.

A particular form or stage of civilization, as that of a certain nation or period: Greek culture.

4.

Development or improvement of the mind by education or training.

5.

The behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group

...and less of a Brand brand [brand] Show IPA noun 1.

Kind, grade, or make, as indicated by a stamp, trademark, or the like: the best brand of coffee.

2.

A mark made by burning or otherwise, to indicate kind, grade, make, ownership, etc.

3.

A mark formerly put upon criminals with a hot iron.

4.

Any mark of disgrace; stigma.

5.

Branding iron.

Just reading the definitions of each of these shows a tremendous difference. When you think about how this can change the dynamics of a company it’s overwhelming. For so many years, I was consumed with “branding” and what we needed to do to establish a market share, brand identity and appeal. While this is important, it is NOT everything – or even close. I would debate if it really should be on any company’s radar. 92

We all know and have seen those “brands” in the industry that are well known and have established names and in many cases large market share... But, who are they? Who are the people behind the brand? What do they do and why? This all began to make more sense to me after the first Underground Strength Session. Let’s back up a bit. In 2005, I was faced with a decision. After two shoulder surgeries and a repaired pec major tendon, I was told I would need a total shoulder replacement. At this time, I was no longer able to place my arm in position to hold a straight bar on my back. When I did (or tried), the pain was intense, and I still could barely hold the bar. After seeing three specialists, they all said the same thing in slightly different ways. This is a summary of what I was told. 1.

Shoulder replacements are serious, and the procedure is not perfected. If you have it done (a partial was not an option it would have to be a total replacement), it was highly suggested that all my training after it was completed was not to exceed bodyweight or at the very most, “light weights.” They explained how the artificial joint would be attached, how it would move and its limitations. I was told I might be able to squat again (maybe), but benching and deadlifting would be out of the questions (unless very light).

2.

Because there is only pain when I do certain movements and my lack of movement doesn’t restrict me from living a normal life, it would be very unwise to have the surgery done. To provide and idea of my lack of range of motion. I 93

cant reach the back of my head, I can't put my hand in my back pocket, I can't reach over head, I can't hold a squat bar and I can't lower a bar to my chest without pain. When I say I can't, I mean even of you grabbed it and forced it - it will not go. I've tried that. 3.

The odds that the shoulder would have more range of motion was only around 50%. Therefore, I would have a less stable, weaker joint, and the ROM may not be better.

4.

If I stopped stressing the joint so much (change the movements I do), then I could postpone this for years or decades, but it would mean I would not barbell squat or bench press (to my chest) again.

My decision was to not have the surgery and live with a bum shoulder that had limited range of motion. This was eight years ago, and while the shoulder is not better, it is also not worse so I have no regrets on this. However, I did have a VERY hard time coming to terms with that I was done powerlifting (this is an understatement as I could write an entire article just on this). I suppose I could have just done deadliftonly meets, but the issue there was that I have always hated the deadlift – ALWAYS – so this was not going to happen. One thing that makes powerlifting different from other sports is there is no end. There is no coach there to say you will not make it to the next level. There is no getting “cut” because you are too old. If this is REALLY in your blood, there is really only two ways out. The first one is where you leave on your own terms. You just decided it’s time and that you are done. Basically you just fade away. The other option is the wear and tear or a serious injury takes you out. You burn out. So you either burn out or fade away. If I could go back in time, I would have 94

MUCH rather faded away, but that was not the card I was dealt. The next couple years were mentally hard. I KNOW I could have done more than I did. Maybe not exactly what I think I could have done but better, rather than what I did do. This ate me up for a couple years because I knew I would NEVER be able to find out. I had a very hard time being around the sport and other lifters who were still competing. It’s not easy to do when you are in a business built on powerlifting roots. I did my best to remove myself from it and focused more on aspects of the business that didn’t directly involve the sport. To be blunt and honest, I began to hate the sport. Not in the way you see other lifters today, who bash federations, judges and lifters. I began to hate it because I didn’t know how to love it without doing it. I respected the lifters, and we kept sponsoring them and even added more. I respected the sport and those in it but from arm’s length. I did still train. This is the part of all of this that I LOVED the most. Regardless if it was bodybuilding or powerlifting, training hard was my biggest passion. It was my way (and always has been) to deal with all the shit the world tossed my way. As the Elitefts weight room grew, the more I had other retired lifters ask if they could come out and train on the weekends. This was great because many of these were guys that I trained and competed with for many years. We killed each other and ourselves to become better. Just to be able to train with them again was a great time. The difference was it was now all for fun. We were not competing. We didn’t HAVE to train a certain way, do certain lifts or have to worry about what our bodyweight and strength was. We just trained hard and had a good time. A bunch of retired meatheads with nothing better to do then train hard and bust each others balls. 95

After about a year of this, a couple of them suggested bringing in a handful of local lifters who wanted to get involved in powerlifting and we would help them by teaching what we knew. I wasn’t a fan of this at the time for the reasons above, plus I now had two little ones at home and wasn’t sure I would be able to commit to a specific training time 3-4 days per week. So we set it up where they would come in on a Saturday and Sunday, and we would tell them what to do during the week. This was a great plan, and I had 5 other exlifters to help out. I didn’t really do shit for the first few months except watch. I wanted to see if the people we brought in were even worth my time and if they were serious. To make a long story short, a couple months later, most of my “helpers” became very inconsistent. I was working with programming a group of lifters who had never competed before. 96

I am not so sure how much later this fell, but they all did do a meet. It was not a pro- level meet, and there were not any pro lifters there. They lifted the following day. It was on this day I fell in love with the sport again. I saw why I got into the sport in the first place. I saw people breaking PRs because they wanted to do it. The weight didn’t matter. What mattered is that they got better. They didn’t have pressure to lift X amount of weight so they could win, rank or make some list. They just wanted to beat their own records – to get better. I also saw one of the guys from our group pull a PR deadlift. A weight he never expected to be able to pull, but he did it. I saw the will and resolve to try something slightly out of his reach, take it and own it! THIS IS POWERLIFTING.

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I have spent so many years, decades in fact, lifting in big meets and never once attended a small meet. I lost touch of the grassroots of the sport. Hell, it was HARD to even train the group I had because I was so used to working with advanced lifters. I had to basically shitcan all I knew and find what would work for them and the build from it. To this day, there are still a few of them, and I will be the first to say their program isn’t what I would really love to see them do, BUT it is the most optimal for THEM. From this, three of them became pro lifters. All the rest have achieved Elite totals. While this was all going on, I was emailed and asked if it would be okay for a group of our sponsors to come up and train for a day. I do not remember the day, except for it was a Saturday. We had around eight sponsors show up to train my “beginner” crew I had at the time and all the retired meatheads. It was years later that I saw the real dynamic of this. The sponsors wanted to come down and train because they grew up watching videos of all of us “retired meatheads” and they wanted to meet and train along side of us. Meanwhile, the group of beginners were currently looking up to the sponsors. In one gym in the middle of nowhere (and at the time, the gym really was in the middle of nowhere) three different generations of powerlifters trained, discussed training, told stories, busted each others balls, had a great time and became human. “Became Human” – The sponsors saw that they were NO different than the guys they used to look up to, thus they could be better than they were. They were no longer images on a DVD but real people just like them that had to deal with the same shit, the same injuries and the same frustrations. If they were able to do it, then so could I. Their perception on who they were and could be changed.

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“Became Human” – The “beginners” saw the sponsors the same way. They were NO different than the sponsors were. They could become just like them with time, effort and will. “Became Human” – The “retired meatheads”, if only for a day, got to feel and be a part of something very cool. We were able to pass on what we knew best. Not the general day-to-day 99

training information you see online. We were able to share and help all of them with the small details they may not have seen, such as the tiny mistakes that took us years to learn. The mistakes it takes 20 years of training before you even begin to make.

Meanwhile, the sponsors were able to help us teach the “beginners” because they work with lifters of this level every time they are in the gym. We discovered – I discovered – that I was trying to find advanced answers to really simple problems. This was Living, Learning and Passing On at the grassroots level. Out of ALL the seminars and Underground Strength Sessions we have had, this is the one I remember the most. THIS played a big role in moving from a Brand into a Culture. How this role would play out later will soon be seen. 100

Part Fifteen

Issues, MAW, and LTT

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“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson “Those that succeed know that chaos and adversity are part of the process. They come to expect and want it around. It’s when you are being tested that your view becomes ‘real.’ When you are being hit from every direction you learn to keep your eyes and ears open, and after a while you begin to see the shots before they are thrown. If you’re too busy giving high fives and growing your own ego there will be someone waiting in the wings to take it all away from you. “You also can’t spend your time wishing things were different, less demanding, or easier. You need to except the circumstances for what they really are. You need to know exactly what they mean and what they can become. If you can’t gain perspective, you need to seek advice of others to help you see things clearly. “This is why I think things like “masterminding” are amongst the most ridiculous concepts I’ve ever heard. The concept is not all that bad, but the way I have seen it applied ends up being a total waste of time. The way to gain perspective is to get out of your comfort zone. A group of like-minded people in the same market sector can offer you nothing except mentorship if you fall 102

into the lower end of the spectrum, but even this is simply mentorship in the form of ‘imitation.’ “To succeed in business you have to embrace your differences and the things that make you unique. The concept of doing as others have done will work to a certain point, but it will never create what really could be. If you need mentorship, find people who are outside your area of business or use focus groups of your own customers. Better yet, use both. The best lifters never imitate all the practices of other lifters. They take what they feel they can use and disregard the rest. Very few do this in business because it takes risk and realism, two things missing in most business owners.”

The passage above in from an article I wrote in 2011. This was shortly after going through the most stressful business experience I’ve had to date. I write to date because there will be more but this one was bad, really bad. I underestimated what was really happening, I never expected it to last as long as it did and I never thought it would cost so much. This one almost sank the ship. I still remember it like it was yesterday. I soon as it started I was pissed and sent an email out to Mike Szudarek. Then I sent a couple other emails out and realized this was some serious shit. REALLY serious. I emailed all my advisers and explained the situation and it was agreed that it was a serious situation that needed outside council. Once this was decided I was asked what my plan was. Having faced a lot of shit in the past this was one road I have never traveled so I replied that I was going in with all I have because sooner or later something like this was going to happen and I have 103

to learn how to deal with the stress associated with this while at the same time keeping the company moving forward. Trust me, this is much easier said than done.

Knowing the outcome could very well sink the company and keeping focus on moving it forward is not easy by any stretch. While there were choices (there always are) there was no way I was going to settle with the ones I was presented with. They would have been fast and easy but would have killed who we were and it would be like starting over. If I was going to start over than it was going to be for real. I was told and knew what I was getting into and I was told it was going to be very hard, I wouldn’t sleep and the stress at times would be through the roof. I was okay with all of this because of three things. 1.

I had been through hell before. while a different type of hell it was still hell and I knew one thing for sure... just keep moving. I knew THIS I could do.

2.

I was not willing to just let go something I knew was in the best interest of the company.

3. 104

I knew I had to do this so I could learn from it. You can learn

a lot about business from other people, books, teachers, mentors and advisors but somethings you have to live through to really learn. This was one of those things. Before this was all over I did not have everything I wanted and compromise had to be found. Elitefts did change forever but we found ways to make it work to our advantage. It also costs WAY, WAY more than I ever expected it to be. To be exact it cost 3900% more than expected. That was not a typo. Once again I found us spending everything we had plus some. This one issue would have been fine on it's own but during the process of dealing with this two other popped up that had to be delt with. I have learned now what issues need to be taken slow and what issue need to be swift. When I started the business in 1998 I had to borrow $500.00 that I paid back the next month. Other than that we have never had to borrow a dime. Everything we have has been our profit reinvested back into the company. In 2011 we had to borrow money (use our credit line), a lot of money. Looking back on it now I see it as making a huge investment in my business education and when I say this I am speaking the truth. Throughout the entire thing I was in what I call my “OCD” mode. Every step of the way I studied, asked questions, did research, and asked more questions. I wanted to learn everything I could about what was going on and why. I knew the risks we were taking and came to a point were I accepted the fact that we may go out of business if this keep going but there was NO WAY I was going to make it all worth nothing! Before the end of the year EVERY cent was paid back. Since this issue we have had close to 15 other “issues” 105

tossed at us and because of the experience and what I learned about the process, the system, the rules of the game and the extreme importance of being patience (and when to not be) I have learned how to deal with all the others day by day and as they come around. Anyone of them could blow up into a big deal but there is no need to stress or worry until that happens. There were several lessons I learned from all of this that changed the course of the business. I learned that, in business, it is very easy to THINK things will be much worse or much less that what they really are. The key is to KNOW exactly what it currently is. Not what it could be, not what it was but what it is right NOW. This is what you deal with. Everything else is fiction and no matter how many moves you want to plan ahead things change. This is not saying you shouldn’t have a plan. Just be prepared for it to change. I learned there is no such thing as a minor issue, or for that matter, a major issue. They are just issues. You can’t let anything get in the way of the creativity and innovation of the business. This HAS to and MUST continue no matter what is going on. You can stress all you want about how bad the “issue” may be four month down the line but it’s important to know that if you head in not in the game you can put yourself out of business in two months. Business can be brutal and there are no playground rules on what is fair or ethical. There are laws we all have to work within but there are ways people can abuse those and work them to their advantage. People you think you can trust will screw you over, words are just words and mean nothing, action only matters if there are 106

results from it, those who talk the best talk usually suck at what they do, negative people don't become positive and very very very few people ever change.

Just because others people and companies are scum doesn’t mean you have to be the same. There is some truth that you better know how to fight it you get into a fight you have to keep your emotions out of it and plat the smart game while always putting the better needs of the company first. There is not always light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes you drive out into the dark. Just because you had to walk through hell don’t expect a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. While it is

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nice when the issues are over there are times when celebration isn’t really in order. It’s just good to be over. I know who I am when my back is against the wall and I know I can keep my values in check. When building a business think of building a fortress that can't be fucked with. Have weapons nobody knows about and only use as needed - if ever. How did any of this change the company and the culture? First, it changed how I thought about business. I was told many years ago that leadership is a nice buzzword people like to toss around but very few really understand. I was also told that in business it will be the last skill to be mastered and for most it never will be. I will be the first to admit I have along way to go but I became a much better leader because of this. Second, I need to touch on the Learn to Train Seminar before touching on this point. Since 2007 we have been associated with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Namely the OH, IN and KY Chapter. This came about because 2007 was a pretty good year and I have always wanted to give more back to charity. With some help from Mike Szudarek (as you can see he has been a vital asset to elitefts and myself. I can’t thank him enough) and weeks of research we decided the Make-AWish foundation was the perfect fit. They fit our values and aim of the company. After meeting with them I knew within the first five minutes this was the right choice. We did do some work with other charities in the past but I really didn’t do my research and had no idea where the money was really going. With MAW we know exactly where it is going and for what it is going to. There are so many great things about this foundation that I 108

will just stop with that and keep the story going. In 2008 we wrote a holiday eBook with all the profits goings to them (every cent). We did the same in 2009 and beat our number from 2008. In 2010 we did the same except didn’t beat the number.

This pissed me off. So, after many years of not doing any seminars I tossed up a seminar and called it the Learn to Train Seminar. For one day and $100.00 I would basally run the same format seminar I did for so many years. I recruited a couple staff members and tossed it on the web site and noted that all profits would go to MAW. On a cold day in January with two staff members, snow on the ground, no food, and the office bathroom we did the first Learn to Train Seminar. We ended up beating the 2009 donation goal.

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I also LOVED the seminar. When I would think back on the seminars of the past all I would think about was the travel, loosing money on most of them - at best breaking even, all the prep work, etc. When I did this one I was reminded of why I did do them for so many years. The seminars ARE what we do everyday on the web site but at the grassroots level. It also allowed my staff to see, hear, and feel what we do everyday online. While I was ass beat when it was over I knew we had to do another one and we had to bring our team in so they could also see, hear and feel what they do everyday online. Thus began the Learn to Train Seminar. We are now embarking on the Learn to Train 7 Seminar and ALL the profit from them, except one, have gone to MAW. Except one. How did the main issue of this section impact the culture of the company? I already said it made me a better leader there is another reason. Actually to me a much bigger reason.

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When we are at the end of the above issues our capital was rock bottom, we did borrow money but my goal was to find a way to pay it all back before the end of the year. We needed help. I called a couple of our long time sponsors who had helped with 1 or 2 of the last Learn to Train Seminars. To be honest these calls were like trying to call and ask a girl on a date. It took me two days before I called the first. What I wanted was for them to come help but unlike other times I wasn’t able to help with any of the expenses and that none of the money was going to go to charity. I started the call simply saying I needed help and asked if they could come to help at the LTT and that it wasn’t going to before charity - just that I needed help. NOT ONE of them even allowed me to tell them why. NOT ONE. I only made three calls and by the end of the day I had twice the help I needed. There were over 20 who showed up and not one question was ever asked. They have NO IDEA what this meant to me. As I thank each of them the day of the seminar they still didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter. All they knew is I needed help. They helped. They put me and the company about their own personal and finical needs that day. I didn’t sleep at all that night. While the money we raised was a drop in the bucket to what I owed it gave me much more than a start. It light a fire under my ass because I knew this was way bigger than any “issue”, or myself. It was bigger than anyone person. This company and what we do became some much bigger to all of us that day. I am not sure what it is but this is NOT a company or brand. It is not a way life, or about getting strong. This is about hope, trust, relationships and knowing that when the shit does hit the fan you are NEVER alone. NOT when you are on team elitefts! 111

I have always worked to build and protect the brand but this changes that day. Collectively I know what this all means now. I know what to look for in new people and when it's time to part ways. I know the essence of the culture and what needs to be done to build it.

By the end of the year all the money was paid back and we were on the road to recovery. Was it worth it? The stress, sleepless nights and finical cost? Yes, with 100% certainty YES. I know this has been a long story and we are almost unto date but there is still more to be told.

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Part Sixteen

Almost Today

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Important Note As noted at the beginning of each of these posts this was written and posted as an internal document. These have been and will continue to be my unfiltered words thoughts and ideas. I am more than aware of the typo's, grammar and spelling errors. This is why these have been posted in my log instead of an article. I want this to be 100% authentic and me. With that comes typos and such. I think in this story these serve an important purpose and another take away but I will leave that up to the readers to figure out.

As you have read, this hasn’t been an easy journey, and there have been many defining moments. Nothing is really easy. Things like selecting which internal operating system to upgrade to seems like a very simple process until you see the cost will run close to $100K and you have to find contractors to help with the integration. What seemed simple just became a major project. At the same time, things you think will be very complex can end up being solved very fast and easy. When I started the company, I never thought I would be doing most of the work I spend my time doing today. I certainly didn’t think I would actually enjoy it. The thing is, I really don’t enjoy much of the day-to-day work I do. What I do enjoy is the outcome it produces (how we help people get stronger in and out of the gym). This is completely opposite to when I competed. I really didn’t care that much about the meets but loved the training process of getting there. When I wrote the book Under The Bar, I spoke about all the things I learned in the weight room that have helped me in life and business. 114

There are many other things I learned in the weight room that have been and can still be damaging to the company. Some of these are:

1. Self Reliance In the gym, your outcome and results are directly related to the work YOU do. Nobody can do it for you. In business, you CAN’T do it all. There is no way in hell Elitefts would be what it is today without all the team members we have had over the years. While I have and always will take full responsibilities for any and all mistakes the company makes I am in no way responsible for the success - this credit belongs to the team.

2. Diversity In the gym, it works best when everyone who is training together does the same thing - trains on the same program, does the same lifts on the same day etc. It is also helpful if they think the same because it becomes easier to diagnose and overcome technical and physical sticking points. It also reduces conflict and builds better team “unity.” As I have seen time and time again, ‘unity’ in business means the death of innovation and creativity. Business is NOT sport, and it’s not a game that can be coached like football. Business is, for a lack of a better term, ‘business.’ It is a growing and evolving process that HAS to be able to breath, expand, contract, evolve and change. Unity is NOT change. It is the complete opposite of change. Change comes from dif115

ference of opinion, conflict, adversity and thinking in ways different from your own. If all you have are a bunch of robots, you will not make it. Adversity and conflict HAVE to be expected and embraced because the gift they offer is ‘change.’ There is a reason why we hire people that have totally different backgrounds. There is a reason why we have people working jobs they may not know anything about when they are hired. There is a reason why we have sponsors that do not work in the strength and conditioning industry. There is a reason we have sponsors who do work within the industry. There is a reason why we recruit people who we feel share the same values but know may not fit into certain ‘clicks.’ We specifically look for people who are DIFFERENT from what we already have. On the surface many lifters may look the same but inside they are totally different. We KNOW this could, can and will cause some drama and conflict down the road. From this conflict, regardless of the outcome, we ALL get better. The team gets better. The business gets better. The business gets better the team gets better. It FORCES us to get better. Even if this means parting ways, both parties are better for it and this has been the case in every situation to date and will continue to be in the future. These situations are anticipated not avoided. This was learned though years of trial and error. We have had moments in time where everyone “pretended” to be the same and we were not getting better. We have had more times where we 116

embraced the differences worked with the drama and adversity, and we all kicked ass. There have also been times where we were parting ways with team members left and right but through all of this we all became better.

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This is really simple when you think about it. People grow, businesses grow and cultures grow when they are tested and face adversity. People do not grow when they hide from there issues and fears, Businesses do not grow when they dictate and don’t listen. Cultures die when people do not accept each other for their differences. Yet, they all thrive when they fall back on their core values and see each other as different and unique individuals who all have something to offer. The trick is knowing the "value" of the offer and what advice to take and what advice to ignore. If you have a business you know this already... Everyone knows better than you do. Everyone can do it better than you. Everyone has the best advice in the world and you are always stupid for not taking and using everything they say. It is always and has always been someone else's idea first. Remember they don't stand in your shoes nor do they know how every action has a reaction and in almost all cases this reaction will hit another person or department they know nothing about. When I write listen that is what I mean - "listen". To me this means absorb and figure out if their suggestions and advice is practical to use. Hearing and acting on what you hear is stupid business and will get your ass burned every time. As I have noted many times before. With many business owners their business is their life's work. It needs to be treated as such, protected as such and every move needs to be made with this in mind. Your actions impact way more than yourself. They directly impact the "silent ones" (I will have a chapter on these people) but also impact everyone associated with the company. When we take on the role of business owner we also take on the responsibility of making decisions based on what is best 118

for the company. This may not be what you feel is best for you, is the most comfortable, or convenient but it IS your job.

3. Pay Backs In the gym, if someone asks you for a spot, there is pretty much a 100% chance if you ask them they will spot you if you need it. In the gym, if you help someone, there is a very good chance they will help you. In business if you help someone, there is a very good chance they will do nothing to help you back. Every day I see, hear and read people bitch about this. This always reminds me of a song by Martina McBride called Do It Anyway. You can spend your whole life buildin’ Something from nothin One storm can come and blow it all away Build it anyway You can chase a dream That seems so out of reach And you know it might not ever come your way Dream it anyway God is great, but sometimes life aint good And when I pray It doesn’t always turn out like I think it should But I do it anyway I do it anyway This worlds gone crazy And it’s hard to believe That tomorrow will be better than today Believe it anyway You can love someone with all YOUR heart For all the right reasons And in a moment they can choose to walk away love ‘em anyway

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God is great but sometimes life aint good And when I pray It doesn’t always turn out like I think it should But I do it anyway Yeah I do it anyway, yeah, You can pour your soul out singin’ A song you believe in That tomorrow they’ll forget you ever sang Sing it anyway Yeah sing it anyway, yeah, yeah I sing I dream I love anyway, yeah. --Far too many times in business (and life), people expect a return on what they give or they will not give if they do not think there will be a return. If you are giving EXPECTING a return, then you are totally giving for the wrong reasons. This is not to be mistaken for investing. When you invest you should expect a return on your investment. Giving and Investing are two totally different things. This is SO easy to get caught up in and is something I have to remind myself of very often. There are so many things that have happened in my life that I could feel bitter about, should feel bitter about and have every right to feel biter about but choose not to. This is a choice, my choice, and one we all have the right and power to make. I don't want to live a life being bitter, holding grudges and hating people. I would rather give myself the gift of forgiveness and keep doing the best I can do to try to make the world a better place. I 120

am only one person and the difference I can make is very small compared to all the problems in this world. Yet, there were people along my path in life who were also only one, that only took one moment and made a difference in me and who I would become. As noted I'm human and fight the same inner battles as everyone else. I ALWAYS circle back to a few simple concepts: •

It is in our human nature to give

•

There have been others who gave to us, so we owe it to them to pass on.

•

I believe we are put on this earth for a reason and I am willing to be it is NOT to make money. I am also willing to bet that somewhere in there is “helping others”.

•

It feels good to help others. If you do not know or understand what I am talking about try giving more and you will see what so many others have discovered.

•

Do you really want to be known as the person who has helped nobody, gave nothing, and doesn't give a shit? Do you really think these people are happy?

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We have the platform and the ability to change people’s lives through something we love so much. We share a common bond with SO many that brings us together. Training is that bond. It is through this bond that we have all come together. It is through that bond that we have all helped each other to become stronger. It is through this bond we can help others see that they do not have to settle for what they lift or who they are. They can be so much more. While I love the Rollins piece on training entitled, The Iron, I do feel he got one piece of this wrong. He states 300 pounds will always be 300 pounds. YES, it will always weigh 300 pounds, but the perception of what that means can change, how heavy it is can change and the ways you lift it can change. For many, 300 pounds may be too much of a load to carry on their back today, but in time, they may become strong enough to press it over head, not just carry it on their backs. People CAN get stronger, mentally and physically. That load may not be 300 pounds, but it may be dealing with their past, dealing with sex abuse, dealing with death, dealing with disabilities, dealing with cancer, dealing with special needs, dealing with conflict, dealing with marriage, dealing with... Think of ALL the things we have been through as a team. Think of how many times we shared these things in our training logs or as articles. THINK of how many people read these. THINK of how many this has helped. We are not just a company that sells equipment. I have always said we are an education company that just happens to sell equipment but when you really think about it we are much more than that. 122

Look past the drama, look past the criticism, look past the products, look past the promotion, look past the training, look past the mirror and you will see this is a culture of people making a difference in people’s lives. Life does not work like a medicine ball rebounder, where you toss out good and great stuff comes right back. The seeds you plant today may never even grow in your life time. You may do all of the planting while someone else may take care of all the nurturing while generations from now someone else gets the harvest. Maybe you don't like the way this sounds or disagree that it shouldn't work like, that's it's not fair but let me ask a question. Are you reaping the rewards from someones seeds planted years ago, decades ago? Before you answer take some time and think on that one. I think the best way to end this segment is to post the team letter I sent out after the Learn to Train 5 seminar. Just replace the words “Learn to Train” with what you all do for Elitefts.

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To Team EliteftsTM and volunteers, It is always hard for me to express in words my gratitude and appreciation for all that you guys do for EliteftsTM, the Learn To Train seminar, and The Make-A-Wish Foundation. I have spoken about, written about, expressed and hopefully displayed my passion for giving back over the years. I have always been very open about why I feel so strongly about this. I’m not sure what it was with this specific seminar. It could have been the season, the smaller number of attendees or the number of specifics that we were trying to make sure fell into place. As you know from your own sacrifices for this, the LTT seminar takes a lot of prep time, arrangements, travel time, time off work and time away from family. Once these commitments are made, there’s another 30 to 36 hours of time donated once we are all together. When this is all added up, there are MANY of you who are donating close to are all together. When this is all added up, there are MANY of you who are donating close to 50 hours of your time for this one event. I barely slept on Friday night, and it wasn’t because I wasn’t worn out. It was because my mind kept looking back on how far some of you have come since I first met you. I was in awe thinking back at what many of you have accomplished, the adversities you have had to face and overcome, and the successful positions you find yourselves in now. This also brought me to thinking about the adversities EliteftsTM has had to face and overcome, as well as how far we have come. While we don’t see each other enough and don’t communicate as often as all of us would like, we are growing together. Your personal, business, and competitive growth is making us all strong(er). We are making each other strong(er). This absolutely amazes me. When I think of what you will all be in the future, it blows my mind. 124

Years ago, I thought I knew what strength was. I thought it was ALL about setting PRs, chasing the next meet and trying to move one more notch up the top 100. However, I soon found out what “you can’t take it with you” means. I discovered very quickly— after the injuries piled up and joints needed to be replaced—that it didn’t matter who I knew, what car I drove, where I trained, how great my gear was, or how much money I had... I was done, and I couldn’t take it with me. This is sport. We all come into this world naked, weak and broken. We will go out weak and broken. I don’t care how strong you are or how many world records you have, unless you die young, we will all go out much weaker than we ever were at our competitive prime. Most of us will go out not even being strong enough to walk, and nobody will care about our PRs. All the strength you gain, the gear you use and the muscle you add are really just smoke and mirrors. It’s just on loan to us for a limited part of the time we are here. Time still moves on regardless if you bench 100 pounds or 900 pounds; time moves forward just the same on a Rolex as it does on a Timex. When you think about the Learn To Train seminar, while we were in the gym teaching people how to train and showing them the skills required to do so, we were all teaching them about life. When we were helping them break PRs, we were showing them what they CAN be when pushed and when they work outside their comfort zone. When we were doing our own training—sweating, turning purple, chalking up, cheering each other on, coaching, spotting, and busting each other’s balls—WE WERE growing, becoming better and getting strong(er). The thing that kept running through my mind this time around wasn’t what was going on inside the gym; it was the GIVING you were doing. The giving to each other, the giving to the attendants and the giv125

ing to yourselves. I once read that you should consider making your life one long gift to others... and why not? We have it on loan, anyway. All that REALLY lasts is passed on. Now, think of this. While we were surrounded around our walls of iron—helping people in the gym, breaking PRs, teaching them how to lift, tweaking our lifts and gear, hitting ammonia caps, chalking up, holding boards, grabbing, pushing and pulling bars, having dinner together, sharing lunches, eating pizza, and telling great stories—outside the gym, not too far away, are children who wish for the chance to create their own stories, form their own memories and have their own wishes come true. Many are in bed hurting, healing, undergoing treatment and are not sure how long they will be in this world. They have parents that will take them to the doctors, get them their meds, cook them chicken soup and run out in the middle of the night for whatever they need. Yet, the one thing their children really wish for, they can’t afford to give. They don’t have the resources to grant them their wish, and they may not have the time to give it to them. Will they ever have the chance to sit back and say, “Do you remember that time...”? For many of these kids, what memories will they have outside of treatment? Most are silent, and they wait. We are the people in the gym, living the life we all love to live. We have what so many would love to have, and we rarely give this a second thought. This past weekend, we DID give it a second thought. We have changed lives in the gym and WILL create memories that some of these children will remember forever. Giving isn’t just about money and strength. It’s about time and spirit. This is what repays. It also helps us to know that we are not going broke—we are in good health, and overall, we are OK. We are at a time 126

in our lives when we can, and are, making a difference by giving back and have the power to do so for so many. I don’t think there has been a time in my life where ‘Live – Learn and Pass On’ has ever meant so much. On Saturday night, while I was speaking with Harry, and Harry was... well... being Harry, he caught me staring off into space. He quickly asked, “What are you thinking right now?” I debated for a second whether to tell him the truth or just make up some hardcore bullshit to blow him off, but I kind of knew I was stuck. He knew there was something going on up there, and if I told him that I thought the orange mono lift should have been made red, he would have known I was lying and would’ve probably punched me in the throat. I have known Harry for some time, and on many things we think in the same level, so I decided to tell him exactly what was on my mind. I began this letter by saying it is hard to express in words my gratitude and appreciation. I know this for a fact because I did try to explain this to Harry, and it wasn’t easy to do. I told him that I was amazed in what I saw over the weekend. Amazed that all these people (YOU) would show up to help, amazed that YOU share the same passion and vision for helping others, and amazed that people would pay to come be a part of this. I expressed to Harry that I didn’t deserve any of this. Coming from what I had to go through, I didn’t feel that I deserved to be a part of an event like this, but here I sit, being the person people are thanking for allowing them be involved. Harry replied back, “Who is?” Who is? This is why it has taken me a couple of days to write this message. I haven’t been able to get those two words out of my head, but now I know the answer.

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It isn’t me... isn’t you. It’s us! Who is? WE ARE! Thank you for all you do. Your work and commitment is appreciated more than you know. Dave Tate We are now at a point in this story where we need to ask who are we NOW and where are we heading. The answers may surprise you...

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